CIO Event - Using Technology to Beat Cancer
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•444 views
Using Technology to Beat Cancer Presented by: Su Crighton, Director of Technology & Change, Cancer Research UK
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
More from Global Business Intel
More from Global Business Intel (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
CIO Event - Using Technology to Beat Cancer
- 1. Su Crighton Director of Technology & Change October 2015 USING TECHNOLOGY TO BEAT CANCER
- 3. OUR STRATEGY • Fundraising • Research • Policy & Information
- 4. FUNDRAISING
- 5. RESEARCH
- 7. CITIZEN SCIENCE OUR VISION IS: TO HARNESS THE PUBLIC’S COLLECTIVE POWER TO SIGNIFICANTLY ACCELERATE ACCURATE CANCER DATA ANALYSIS, AND HELP BRING FORWARD THE DAY WHEN ALL CANCERS ARE CURED.
- 11. CITIZEN SCIENCE
- 13. THANK YOU Please check your itinerary and move on to your next session. Slides will be available post event.
Editor's Notes
- SYou may have seen some of our recent advertising campaigns, telling you how bears or sprinkles kill cancer. Well, today I want to talk to you about some of the ways in which we’re using technology to beat cancer.
- First, let me tell you a bit about Cancer Research UK. We have a very simple corporate vision… we’re going to beat cancer. Everything that we do comes back to this vision and last year we set out a strategy for our work over the next 20 years… we are going to accelerate progress such that by 2034 3 in 4 people who are diagnosed with cancer will survive for more than 10 years. We have 3 core functions as a charity which come together to do this… Over the next 30 minutes or so, I’ll talk to you a bit about the technology and solutions we are using with each of these teams to bring forward the day when all cancers are cured. I’ll also talk to you about a very specific example of how we are using technology to accelerate our research through using the public to help analyse data.
- Our fundraising is probably the most familiar aspect of the work that we do – we don’t receive any government funding and so all our funds come from the generosity of our supporters. Last year we raised £550m through the generosity of our supporters. Most of you will be familiar with some of our fundraising campaigns… Race for Life – now in it’s 21st year – UK’s most recognised charity event In addition to Race we run a number of different events and challenges including the London 3 Peaks (pic), marathons, triathlons… To support these, we are developing an events platform which allows our supporters to find, register for, participate in and fundraise from any of our events via mobile, tablet, desktop… Stand Up To Cancer – telethon in conjunction with C4. Any YouTube afficionado’s may have seen our 12-hour SU2C YouTube live party last Saturday – partnering with Google to test out the concept of an online telethon To support SU2C we had to develop a donations platform which could process up to 45 transactions per second, we also take payments via mobile donation…etc. “Tap on a window” contactless payments – in February of this year we trialled contactless donation window displays in 4 of our shops using 55” screens running a video of a CRUK scientist. By tapping a contactless payment card on the window, you donate £2 to CRUK and the screen shows how this money will be used to fund our life-saving research These are just some of the ways in which technology underpins our fundraising capability. We also have the CRM and BI applications that you would expect to see, helping us to understand and analyse supporter behaviour and target our campaigns appropriately. Looking to the future we will continue to look for new ways in which we can harness and utilise technology to support our goals and make it easier to fundraise, donate and support CRUK
- Our research is focused on tackling all 200 types of cancer on all fronts: PREVENT – reduce people’s risk of developing cancer DIAGNOSE – diagnose more cancers earlier TREAT – develop new cancer treatments OPTIMISE – make existing treatments more effective Last year we spent £341m on research and we funded more than 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses across the UK. Through their work we have progressed our understanding of the biology and causes of cancer as well as developed and trialed a number of new treatments. We currently support over 250 clinical trials ranging from early-phase drug trials through to studies to improve surgery & radiotherapy. From the IT department, we support not only the office based tools that our researchers need but also the grant management system, the specialist scientific equipment used in our laboratories and the systems which support, monitor and manage our clinical trials.
- In addition to our research, a big part of what we do is about raising awareness of some of the causes of cancer, providing information about cancer, its signs and symptoms and the different treatments available. We also campaign for better treatment and key preventative measure such as reducing the impact of tobacco through plain packaging, smoke-free areas…etc. As with much of our other work, technology underpins our ability to support our policy & information agenda, making detailed information available and easy to search online, providing information and statistics about cancer prevalence and sharing information with partners such as NHS England to help GPs to diagnose more cancers earlier.
- A very specific example of how we have been using technology to progress our fight against cancer is Citizen Science. Citizen Science isn’t something that we invented – it is all about using crowd-sourcing, and the general public, to further scientific research and has been most commonly used in ecology or astronomy to count the insects & birds in your garden or the stars & planets in the night sky. More recently, Citizen Science is being used in the biomedical space to accelerate the pace of research by enabling the public to classify huge sets of data and this is what we have been doing since 2012. Research advances in areas such as imaging and gene sequencing have brought about an era of ‘big data’ and even some of the most straightforward experiments or tests leave scientists with terabytes of data to be analysed. Computers can process much of this, but there are fine patterns in cancer molecules and gene sequences which can only be spotted by the human eye – trawling through thousands of images takes up scientists’ valuable time. In pathology alone backlogs of over a million samples are sitting idle, representing unrealised opportunity and lost insight. Citizen Science can address this need by harnessing the general public to support our research. Our first foray into this was through a relatively simple online programme called CellSlider which thousands of people used to classify images from tumour samples. Over two million classifications were made, cutting the time taken by researchers to analyse the data from 18 months to just 3.
- Following the success of Cell Slider, we started to look at how we could do more through Citizen Science and engage a wider audience. In March 2013 we held a hackathon working with developers from companies including Facebook, Google and Amazon we ran a 3 day Game Jam challenging teams to take gene data and to turn the analysis of it into a game. In 48 hours, 55 hackers came up with 12 prototype games of which Genes in Space was selected as the winner Genes in Space was launched in 2014 – it sees players plotting a course through a field of ‘Element Alpha’ – a graphical representation of DNA data that has been collected by scientists. By plotting key points where Element Alpha is dense, players are helping to identify areas in the data where DNA may be copied or missing and therefore faulty, indicating where there might be genetic abnormalities. Players then fly their spaceship along the course plotted as they fight off asteroids hurtling towards the craft – while actually analysing the cancer data for a second time. By getting many players to fly through the same data over and over again, we build up a reliable and accurate method of analysing such huge quantities of information
- Reverse The Odds, a mobile game we released as part of Stand Up 2 Cancer in 2014 is a great example of how we’ve used technology as a platform for the public to do great science. Here’s a short video of our research collaborator Dr Anne Kielty to explain just how Reverse The Odds has helped her bladder cancer study.
- Our mobile games have yielded a great deal of publicity for us, and in the case of Reverse The Odds, been a massive support to research. Since the release of these titles, we’ve focussed on improving the public’s accuracy. This has led to us moving away from mobile for now and focussing on developing projects that live on desktops and laptops. By doing this, and spending more time developing tutorials and how we present samples for analysis, we’ve been able to dramatically increase the public’s accuracy. All of these learning will be taken forward as we prepare to build our new web-based platform, launching in 2016 – the screenshot here is from the beta.
- I hope that today’s presentation has been of interest and outlined some of the ways in which Cancer Research UK are using technology to beat cancer. Global Events have been kind enough to make CRUK their charity of the year and I will be speaking again, briefly, before dinner and inviting you to support our work through a donation. So if you would like to help us in our fight, please bring your wallets to dinner and give generously