BioGrid Australia’s CEO Maureen Turner has welcomed news that researchers from Peter Mac have received grants valued at more than $6 million from the Medical Research Futures Fund to improve cancer care.

“BioGrid has been involved in securing the funding for these important studies and will be providing the required secure infrastructure as well as data linkage and curation underpinned by BioGrid’s ethical and governance framework, to deliver these programs,” said Ms Turner.

Peter Mac will lead two large collaborative studies, one utilising artificial intelligence to identify emerging infections in cancer patients and the other to create a digital platform to drive research in areas of need.

The Medical Research Future Funds aims to support a range of research to improve the health of Australians

Peter Mac researchers received more than six million in funding as part of the National Critical Research Infrastructure initiative designed to identify and fund world-class health and medical research.

Associate Professor Leon Worth, Medical Director Infection Prevention at Peter Mac will lead a project called “Applying artificial intelligence for surveillance of infections in cancer.”

“This project uses a next-generation digital platform termed EINSTEIN (Enhancing Infection Surveillance to Transform Excellence In National cancer care) and draws on a digital learning health framework and data science to detect serious and emerging infections in the immune compromised cancer population,” said Associate Professor Worth.

“People being treated for cancer are at a greater risk of infection due to their compromised immune system and often the infection is harder to treat for the same reason.

“The earlier we can detect and treat an infection the greater our chance of stopping it from becoming life threatening. With this platform we aim to develop a national scalable system standardising digital algorithms.

“The data will be incorporated into a clinical portal to accommodate everyday workflows in an electronic health record environment to assist clinical decision making around infection surveillance in the real world,” he said.

This project is led by Peter Mac in collaboration with the University of Queensland, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, BioGrid Australia Limited, Melbourne Health and Royal Melbourne Hospital.

BioGrid has been working with Associate Professor Worth on the precursor to the EINSTEIN project - the Invasive Fungal Infections Surveillance Project – providing infrastructure and data curation services.

Professor Karin Thursky also received a grant of close to three million dollars to lead a project called “Optimising real-world data use to drive cancer care delivery and research.”

The project involves a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, consumers, and researchers from health services, cancer cohorts, and digital health to establish a new research infrastructure.

“The National Cancer Cohort Platforms will be a significant Australian digital asset that will bring together several influential national cancer cohort studies into one location, including linkages to biospecimen repositories, and familial pedigrees,” said Professor Thursky.

The collaboration between KConFab, Australian Ovarian Cancer Study, Variants in Practice (ViP) Study, Lifepool, and Melanoma Research Victoria cancer cohort studies as well as BioGrid Australia, the Department of Health Services Research at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and the VCCC Alliance, is the first of its kind.

“This initiative will drive research by making these valuable clinical assets widely available to consumers, patients, clinicians and researchers in Australia and internationally, with a view toward their sustainability and interoperability,” said Professor Thursky.

“This approach provides a real opportunity to make progress in areas of unmet need in cancer, and to harness the power of big data, including the development of a platform that will meet our future needs,” she said.

BioGrid has extensive experience providing the digital environment to support similar research programs, and specialises in centralising access to distributed data sets and biobanks via their national data governance and connectivity platform. A key part of BioGrid’s offering is the proven ability to protect patient and clinician privacy and data security.

“We look forward to working with Peter Mac’s teams on both these important initiatives to support improved cancer care,” said Ms Turner.