The national peak body for health and medical research, Research Australia, has heralded CMRI's ground-breaking ProCan cancer project that aims to accurately predict an individual’s best treatment options.

The ProCan project at Children’s Medical Research Institute (CMRI) will allow doctors to diagnose cancers more accurately, better predict patient outcome and identify the best course of treatment. CMRI is building an unparalleled database of the results of its analyses of cancer samples sourced from patients in Australia and around the world to inform the approach.

The team has developed a world-first data analysis workflow to enable reliable comparison of results from cancer samples that were analysed by different instruments over a long period of time. The achievement has been recognised internationally through publication in the journal, Nature Communications, and in Australia as a finalist for the Data Innovation Award (sponsored by Bupa Health Foundation) in Research Australia’s Health and Medical Research Awards.

Research Australia CEO Nadia Levin said the ProCan project had broken new ground in cancer proteomic research, with exciting results still to come.

“This is a wonderful example of data science driving biomedical advancement,” she said.

“ProCan’s data analysis innovation enables cancer samples to be compared regardless of when the samples were processed – and on a scale never seen before.

“This research brings together data scientists, software engineers, clinicians, biomedical researchers and other specialists to push the boundaries of large-scale ‘big data’ methodology so that we may better understand the unique properties of each individual cancer and take a vital step toward developing precision treatment plans for every patient.”

Dr Qing Zhong, ProCan’s Cancer Data Science Group Leader, said the innovation had benefited more than 50 of ProCan’s ongoing cancer projects since 2017.

“One of the biggest challenges when the project began was to see if it was even possible to process a cancer sample successfully within a 36-48 hour period,” he said. “Now we can get a result in nine hours from receiving a sample and the data workflow innovation is a critical enabling technology for the analysis of the data from thousands of cancer samples .”

Jackie Walters whose daughter Marley was diagnosed with a germ cell tumour shortly before her first birthday, said supporting medical research helped families like hers fight cancer.

“Investing in research is super important,’’ Jackie said. “If you go to any hospital with children, you will open your heart because it is so hard to sit in there and watching everybody broken. And you know, really, you're just praying that the treatments that they're using on your child – which have been developed from research – will work. Otherwise, they won't be here.’’

The winners of the Health and Medical Research Awards will be announced at a Gala dinner and ceremony on 9 December in Sydney.

Research Australia is the national peak body for Australian health and medical research.