We will capitalize on the excellent clinical data in Scotland by making it available to all six tumour themes with an aspiration to set up mechanisms to provide data to researchers in other cancer types. Our data allows rich clinical phenotyping, clinical pathway analysis and outcome measurement spanning the whole cancer journey from screening and diagnosis to treatment, survivorship and end of life care. Clinical annotation is inherent as a complement to molecular data and research datasets. Clinical, and any accompanying molecular, data fundamentally underlying aspects of the Centre’s work by allowing a stratified approach; by prior risk of disease or cancer subtype, for example, allowing the identification of high-risk patients for optimisation of screening, surveillance, investigation and treatment. Mechanistic insights into disease will be generated from pre-clinical in vitro/in vivo model systems that can provide a detailed understanding of disease aetiology. The data theme will also support the generation and integrated analysis of pre-clinical and patient-derived multiomics datasets, leading to mechanistic insights and target identification. Data is also essential for evaluating the clinical value and health service impact of new technologies and medicines emerging from our research programme; and for the identification of patients for translational research and clinical trials.
The CRUK Scotland Centre will act as a central hub for collection, alignment, analysis, storage and access to rich cancer data sets. Cancer centre analysts will be embedded in Public Health Scotland, the NHS Lothian data loch, the NHS GGC Safe Haven and the CRUK Scotland Institute. National and International collaborating initiatives will feed into our Centre data platforms. Our Informatics track record relies on close working at the University of Edinburgh with the School of Informatics and the Usher Institute for Population Health and Informatics. Harrison (Hepatobiliary Theme) is Director of the Centre for Medical Informatics which will provide additional skills base in informatics. The Bayes Centre (https://www.ed.ac.uk/bayes/) is the University’s innovation hub for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. The technical strengths brought together in Bayes build on world-leading academic excellence in the mathematical, computational, engineering, and natural sciences in the University’s College of Science and Engineering. The Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC – Parsons https://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/ ) provides world-class computing facilities for scientists and collaborates with researchers in areas ranging from particle physics to cosmology, novel materials to combustion and climate modelling to energy. As well as providing the hardware for our Safe Havens, EPCC provides programming support to overcome computational challenges that arise in our research. The Robertson Centre for Biostatistics hosts Glasgow and West of Scotland Safe Haven data which sits within the Institute of Health and Wellbeing (IHW) at the University of Glasgow. The proposal reflects all three themes of the IHW: Data Science; Determinants of Health and Health Inequalities; and Solutions Focused Research.