The deployment by one of the UK’s Academic Health Sciences Centres (AHSCs) of software that consolidates different types of translational medicine data from multiple sites is a “groundbreaking step forward” for personalised therapy and cancer research, its developer says.
King’s Health Partners, the AHSC formed by King’s College London with Guy’s and St Thomas’, King’s College Hospital and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trusts, has adopted the Oncology Research Information System (ORIS), which UK-based software provider IDBS says is the first platform of its kind to go into production.
“Until now, cross-hospital translation medicine technology to consolidate data across different scientific domains has been the subject of some debate but we have seen little movement in the industry in terms of actually making it happen,” IDBS observes.
ORIS is based on IDBS’s Enterprise Translational Medicine Solution, which supports translational medicine research across organisations.
Initial use of the new platform will enable King’s Health Partners to combine clinical, genetic and tissue sample data from more than 26,000 historic breast cancer patients, alongside a current feed of new consented patient data direct from the clinic into the longitudinal research database, IDBS notes.
Valuable resource
The platform also creates a valuable resource for pharmaceutical, biotechnology and diagnostic companies interested in cancer research collaborations, it adds. ORIS can identify patient cohorts with similar disease characteristics whose treatment, genetic profiles and outcomes can be tracked while retaining patient confidentiality.
The information fed into the platform is integrated from multiple sources including an in-house cancer information system, electronic patient records, and diagnostic imaging and breast pathology data.
All of the patient data are de-identified and secured within the system, then released to genomic analysis applications and analytics for patient outcomes and clustering.
Ideal environment
The ORIS design has the necessary flexibility and scalability for King’s Health Partners and other centres of excellence to roll it out in multiple therapeutic areas, IDBS points out.
“ORIS is the ideal environment for us to advance our translational medicine studies to better understand the complex causes and molecular basis of cancer,” commented Professor Peter Parker, head of the Division of Cancer Studies and R&D lead for the Integrated Cancer Centre at King’s Health Partners.
