While cancer still remains responsible for a quarter of deaths in Britain, the use of agentic artificial intelligence is speeding up the search for cures.
While cancer is the cause of just over a quarter of all deaths in England in a typical year, the figures are improving. Over the past 50 years, the proportion of the UK population dying from cancer has fallen by more than a fifth (22%) – from around 328 per 100,000 people in 1973 to around 252 per 100,000 in 2023, according to Cancer Research UK.
As Alex Adjei, head of the Cleveland Clinic’s Cancer Institute, told Healthcare Today at the end of August: “Whether you see the glass as half-full or half-empty depends on your perspective, but overall, I think the fight against cancer is a story of real, measurable progress,” Adjei says.
Certainly, it is one that has been embraced by both the government and the private sector, with technological innovations at the forefront.
In the summer, the government said that women in England who haven’t come forward for vital health checks will be offered home-testing kits as part of the cervical screening programme under the upcoming 10 Year Health Plan.
At the same time, NHS patients will be the first in Europe to benefit from a new non-invasive liver cancer treatment which uses ultrasound technology to destroy tumours without surgery. At the beginning of September, NICE recommended a new treatment for advanced urothelial cancer, with clinical trials showing survival rates that are almost twice as long compared to standard treatment.
As for the private sector, within the past few months, the Royal Marsden Private Care became the first in the UK to treat multiple myeloma patients with CAR-T cell therapy, outside of clinical trials; Nuffield Health said that it intended to invest in women’s health and breast cancer diagnostics, beginning the rollout of the latest mammography technology in its hospitals in Cheltenham and Chester, and with Wessex, Cardiff Vale and Oxford hospitals set to follow over the summer; and Cleveland Clinic London is to construct an 81,000-square-foot cancer centre at 40 Grosvenor Place in Belgravia, London, to expand its cancer services.
How to use AI
The game changer is artificial intelligence (AI), which has moved from science fiction to science fact.
“It’s understandable that new technologies like AI are met with hesitation. But these tools are no longer experimental and haven’t been for a number of years. They are regulated, often recommended by national public healthcare bodies, deployed in NHS settings, and changing lives,” Neil Daly, chief executive and founder of Skin Analytics, wrote earlier this month.
The challenge has been one of communication – that the wider public does not understand how this technology is helping to develop treatments for cancer.
In an exclusive interview with Healthcare Today due to be published later this week, Garry Nolan, cancer specialist and the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris professor in the department of pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine, explains why AI has such potential to help.
“No single human can hold in their head the millions of studies, data points and pathways involved in all the different cancers,” he says.
Large language models, however, can scan vast literatures and connect concepts that might otherwise remain buried in a footnote. More to the point, agentic AI, a type of artificial intelligence designed to make decisions autonomously and to take actions to achieve a complex goal with limited human supervision, makes this even more powerful. “It can present them in direct response to a clinician’s question,” he says.
The technology is improving every year and although Nolan describes himself as an optimist, he cautions against some of the claims that have been made.
“AI will help us solve cancer… and do many other great things,” he says, though there is one significant caveat. “Humans must stay in the loop to guide the questions and interpret the answers. That human-machine partnership is where the real power lies,” he says.
