Research Programme Could Be ‘Game Changer for Cancer Survival,’ Says Scientist

Our Future Health, the UK’s largest health research programme, and the data it collects could be a “game changer” for cancer diagnosis and survival rates, the project’s executive director of science has said. Our Future Health is a project which aims to improve how scientists prevent, detect, and treat cancer through the study of donated blood samples. Researchers will use a database of blood samples which were collected two to five years before participants receive a cancer diagnosis to look for key markers or patterns for the disease. It is a similar principle to an earlier study on ovarian cancer conducted by Cancer Research UK and other charities, where women were asked to give blood at yearly intervals. If a participant developed ovarian cancer, scientists could then look back at her previous blood samples to try to identify any markers in them before her symptoms had manifested....