Love Your Sister funding helping big data project crack the code of kids’ cancer

There’s a BEACON of hope for kids with cancer, as data specialists at Hudson Institute of Medical Research embark on an exciting new discovery project, thanks to funding from the cancer medical research charity, Love Your Sister.

Dr Claire Sun leads a bioinformatics team at Hudson Institute’s Centre for Cancer Research, analysing comprehensive molecular, drug response and genetic vulnerability data from hundreds of paediatric cancer tumour models. But so far, that has been the easy part.

The harder part has been how to analyse and make sense of the mountains of data produced by these thousands of experiments, and thanks to Love Your Sister, it’s now all starting to come together.

Dr Sun’s grant of $426,276 over three years will fund the big-data Empowered AI for Childhood ONcology (BEACON) platform that promises to help change the prognosis for children with cancer.

Huge quantity of kids’ cancer data

It will allow researchers at Hudson Institute and more than 50 global medical research partners to access enormous quantities of childhood cancer data to improve health outcomes and prognoses for children affected by cancer.

Dr Sun says the BEACON platform will enable researchers locally and globally to:

• Analyse cancer samples from diverse public and private sources (Hudson Institute currently houses the largest collection of rare childhood cancer cell models globally in our dedicated Childhood Cancer Model Atlas). These cancer cell samples are derived from the tumours of individual childhood cancer patients.
• Test thousands of potential drug treatments on hundreds of different cancer samples to determine which samples, along with which combinations of drugs, can provide the next breakthrough treatment for patients with a specific cancer profile.
• Interrogate vast datasets of childhood cancer patients from around the world.
• Process the data using state-of-the-art AI analytical algorithms. Thereby revealing patterns and trends within the data and ensure adaptability of the platform to a variety of experimental designs.

“This world-first platform will bridge the gap between data and meaningful outcomes, accelerating the translation of research into actionable insights,” Dr Sun said. “BEACON will allow researchers to spend more time on driving meaningful discoveries and less time wrestling with data-related challenges.”