Imagine the day when all cancers can be cured – it’s the ultimate objective of cancer research. Yet according to the World Health Organisation, cancer accounted for nearly 10 million deaths, globally, in 2020 alone.
From prevention and early diagnosis, to treatment and cancer management, innovation and collaboration sit at the heart of accelerating oncology research. That’s why at Bruntwood SciTech, we teamed up with some of the biggest names in UK cancer research and clinical excellence, plus four major global pharmaceutical and healthcare companies to combine forces and help accelerate the translation of emerging cancer research into patient benefits. The Alderley Park Oncology Development Programme is working with companies and academic researchers across the UK, to help them develop their innovations more quickly and efficiently, ready to take on new funding or collaborators to accelerate the progress of their innovations commercially.
Five months into the programme, and now approaching the end of part one of the Development Phase, we’re taking a look at the eight projects who have impressed the consortium of experts and have made it through
Itecho Health
Led by Dr Adrian Brown, CEO and Consultant in Public Health, Itecho Health is a digital health company led by clinicians and technology experts. Their platform, Ascelus, is focused on remote monitoring and management of long-term conditions including cancer. Following on from their work in prostate cancer, the team decided to explore the use of the Ascelus platform to collect Real World Evidence focussed on oncology drugs. By collecting robust quality of life data from patients and integrating this with hospital IT systems data on healthcare utilisation, this will allow pharmaceutical companies to provide high quality evidence to regulators.
What have you enjoyed most about the programme so far?
“It has been fantastic to be in such a high calibre scheme with some fascinating state of the art projects. The majority of the projects are based on drug discovery and it has been great to be able to represent a different, but in our view equally important innovation in oncology. We have particularly enjoyed applying the business models in a practical way to a real example (rather than in the past when it has been more theoretical).”
