The PROSECCA Study, Answering New Questions in Prostate Cancer

Nearly half of all cancer patients receive radiotherapy as part of their treatment and although it is effective at destroying cancerous lesions deep within the body, this comes at the cost of damaging healthy, or normal, tissues. With 50% of cancer patients surviving for 10 years or more, these patients can be left with life-changing side effects from their radiotherapy. It is clear that more must be done to limit damage to normal healthy tissue without compromising annihilation of the tumour and curing patients. The key to this is personalising an individual's radiotherapy treatment, in other words rather than assuming that all tumours respond similarly to radiotherapy, the treatment is optimised for an individual. To date, approaches to do this have been restricted to small numbers of carefully selected patients, are inordinately expensive, and not suitable for rolling out into everyday practice across the NHS. There is however another way, namely using Artificial Intelligence (AI) combined with an individual's healthcare record. By linking together large numbers of healthcare records at a national level, combined with the power of AI, the PROSECCA project will transform radiotherapy and cancer care.