Brock University

Published purpose

Cancer is a collection of abnormal phenotypes characterized by malignant, invasive, and uncontrollable cell growth caused by different genome mutations and reflected by distinct genomic signatures. Treatment outcomes of different cancer types may vary, with some specific successful survival stories, but in general, cancers remain largely incurable with current therapeutic solutions. Precise personalized treatments are essential to effectively increase patient survival rates but can also be very expensive and inefficient due to higher level of requirements in diagnosis and identification of therapy procedures. Through NRC’s Ideation and NRC-DT pipeline research, the project team has identified mutations in several groups of genes associated with breast and lung cancers. Results suggest this is applicable to other cancer types as well. Aiming at reducing cost and increasing survival rate in cancer therapeutics, this research project brings genomic research to clinical application in personalized cancer treatment through digital (AI) technologies by exploring available large-scale genomic data, drug annotation and efficacy data, and biogenic medicine data, and incorporating these data with pathway information. The digital technologies (AI models and data analysis pipelines) and experimental approaches developed in the project, and the medicinal and genomics resources will be broadly applicable to other areas in personalized precision health care delivery.