614 - NHS Partnership Could Lead to more Specialised Cancer Care

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Welcome to Modern Mindset, the show that picks the brains of the world's leading minds to help you unlock yours. Decoding the beliefs and strategies of global experts to give you an updated mindset to make the most of modern life.

Rory McGowan (0:20)

This is Modern Mindset, the show that picks the brains of the world's leading minds to help you unlock yours. My name is Rory McGowan, and here in the UK, we see that cancer wait times are still far too high for many people. Maybe you know someone or yourself have been stuck on a treatment waiting list, and the government is racing to get these long waits down as fast as they can.

Part of that solution in cancer care is for more research and oncologists' second opinions to be given to patients. And one UK based private firm is joining that journey, announcing a partnership with the NHS to get these resources to more people. To talk about what that means for both the NHS and the general public, I'm joined by Ben Whately, the co-founder and CEO of Astron Health, who are partnering with the NHS. Ben, it's lovely to have you on.

Ben Whately (1:09)

Good to be here.

Rory McGowan (1:10)

Yeah, thank you for joining me. So let's talk about this partnership. What can you explain the details behind it and kind of what it will mean for cancer patients here in the UK?

Sure.

Ben Whately (1:21)

So I guess as background, there's a huge disparity in the quality of cancer treatment, and therefore cancer outcomes in the UK and globally. And so people who are treated at the top cancer centers do get better results. And this is largely postcode lottery or whether you can afford to pay for private health care. The reason is that those cancer centers, these specialist cancer centers get better outcomes, is largely down to the fact that the oncologists there have more time to review each case. And using the latest technology, using the output of RNA and DNA sequencing tests just takes time. It's a lot of research to analyze the petabytes of data that come with each patient's test result.

And oncologists at most hospitals have incredibly high workload, there are long wait times, they have very little time per patient in order to make their decisions. And so they just can't leverage all of that information that is now available through testing.

So what we do at Astron is we analyze that data using an AI research platform that we've built that analyzes over 170,000 research papers. It takes in all of the testing data, petabytes of data, looks at the pathways that are driving each patient's cancer, and then looks for the research evidence that matches those with treatments. Now, we don't give treatment recommendations from that piece of software. What then happens is we've collected together a group of the leading research oncologists in the country, and we put them together into what we call a molecular tumor board, who then reviews the research that we've done. And that research is research that they would have done themselves and would have taken them hours and hours and hours. But because our platform is able to speed that up for them, they can get the results in minutes, and they can then review that, discuss it, and give the output.

Rory McGowan (3:21)

Okay. There's a couple of things I want to pick up on there, Ben. You talked about a postcode lottery there.

Can you tell us which postcodes have the best cancer care if this is an issue? I feel like I might be able to guess the answers because North-South disparities always exists, but no, you know more than me.

Ben Whately (3:41)

Yeah. I have to say I'm not an expert on exactly how you get into the best cancer centers, but what I can say is that less than 1% of patients will be seen by a molecular tumor board in the UK, which is a very, very low number.

And almost all patients could benefit from that insight that you get from that. And so what we're doing through this partnership with, it's the largest NHS testing laboratory, which is West Midlands Genomics in Birmingham. And we're partnering with them to, from their side, we're commercializing their tests to make it available to people outside the NHS.

And what we're giving to them is our research capability that means that NHS patients will get the benefit of this much more detailed analysis that we're able to do. And so it's a big part of the NHS 10-year plan is to make much deeper use of, much broader use of genomic and transcriptomic data. So gene sequencing and RNA sequencing. Now, they have that capability. They can do that testing. They can generate the raw data. But converting that raw data into clinically actionable information is another big step that requires a great deal of work. And that's the bit that we're bringing to them.