England Launches National Cancer Database

Public Health England (PHE) has created a database containing detailed clinical information on each of the 350,000 cancers diagnosed in England every year, along with data from more than 11 million cancer patient records dating back 30 years.

Cancer clinicians in the UK will now have instant access to histopathology reports, imaging information, treatment responses, and patient-reported outcome surveys—all in one place. A primary goal of the National Cancer Registration Service for England database is to help oncologists personalize treatment for every patient, says Jem Rashbass, MD, PhD, national director of disease registration at PHE, a newly organized agency within the country's National Health Service.

“To personalize care, you need not just genomic data and tissue sample data from individual tumors, but you need very large, high-accuracy clinical datasets to find commonalities,” says Rashbass, noting that the database also provides a wealth of information beyond the clinic.

“Researchers now have a huge collection of historical clinical data, longitudinal data, and follow-up data. The research you could do on the data itself is endless—treatment combinations, new types of interventions, survival times, outcomes, and so on,” adds Rashbass. He expects researchers from both the UK and abroad to request access to the data.

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) is developing a similar all-in-one cancer database called CancerLinQ, which also incorporates clinical decision support technology to help oncologists make evidence-based treatment decisions.

“CancerLinQ is more point-of-care focused than the PHE database,” says Clifford Hudis, MD, president of ASCO and chief of the breast cancer medicine service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, NY.

Like the database in England, CancerLinQ is expected to create new hypotheses for cancer research. The technology may also allow researchers and physicians to confirm the validity of clinical trial results.

“What we hope to accomplish with CancerLinQ is to start to see provocative, interesting associations in routine practice that are occurring in the 97% of patients who are not on clinical trials,” Hudis says.

ASCO hopes to make the first components of CancerLinQ available in late 2014, with the eventual goal of compiling information on every patient diagnosed with cancer in the United States.

For more news on cancer research, visit Cancer Discovery online at http://CDnews.aacrjournals.org.