Barts Health receives grant for PharosAI project
Barts Health has won a £4.3m Government grant as part of a prestigious project to accelerate the path to AI-powered cancer care.
Our share of a £18.9m investment will package data from our cancer patients and tissue banks onto a secure platform that researchers can access to develop the next generation of AI tools for cancer diagnosis and drug discovery.
The award recognises the pioneering design work of two Barts Health clinicians who are part of a consortium that includes our academic partners at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) as well as Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London.
Prof Louise Jones and Prof Hemant Kocher, of the Barts Cancer Institute at QMUL, are honorary consultants at The Royal London hospital. They run biobanks of tissue samples from patients with breast and pancreatic cancer respectively that provided the core of the data resource.
A separate grant will enable them to lead more research into enriching the data with genome sequencing and clinical imaging.
Meanwhile the Barts Health funding will enable Dr Sophie Williams and the data science team from Barts Life Sciences to provide vital expertise in AI development, and ensure that our own precision medicine resource, the Barts Health Data Platform, led by Dr Steven Newhouse, is integrated into the wider PharosAI project.
The ultimate aim is to create a data refinery that amalgamates information from multiple sources into a consistent form that organisations can make use of to test AI algorithms without any risk of breaching patient confidentiality.