At present only a fraction of the data collected from patients in the clinic is used to determine treatment options. This is because the data is stored in different formats and locations making it difficult to compare and analyse.
The new funding will be used to bring together many different types of patient data in one place to create an integrated data platform. This will enable researchers to compare and examine the data and to develop tools to predict the best treatment option for each patient.
Samples that have already been collected from over 6,000 breast cancer patients who have taken part in research studies and clinical trials, and agreed for their data to be used in research, will be combined to increase our understanding of how different subtypes of breast cancer respond to different treatment options.
Alongside each biopsy sample a variety of genomic, imaging, molecular and clinical data has also been recorded, but all the different types of information are currently stored separately making useful analysis difficult.
Initially these massive diverse data sets will be merged using cutting edge technology to create a multi-modal breast cancer resource called Synergia-Breast Cancer.
