Faglige nøgleord: Cancer, therapy, AI, treatment, patients, immunology
Oplæg tilgængeligt på: Engelsk og græsk
Every one of us has likely wondered at some point why so many people still get cancer, and why so many die of this disease. If we can cure other seemingly fatal diseases like diabetes, then why can't we deal with cancer once and for all?
The truth is, that cancer is not one disease - if our vocabulary had enough words, we could assign a different name in every patient's cancer - and that is because every cancer is unique. Our efforts until today have been focused on giving every cancer patient the same treatment - very much like trying to fits everyone's feet in a size 40 shoe, while only a small percentage of us wear this size. But the tide is turning now. Using Artificial Intelligence, we can now design therapies tailored to each patient's unique tumor, which have shown unprecedented efficacy in trials with skin cancer patients.
My project is focusing on understanding what cancer treatment the patient will most likely respond to, so we give them the right medicine. Why is it important? Well, imagine you have a headache, but the pain killer your doctor give you just won't do the trick. You are left baffled, worried, and anxious about what is going to happen. Will it ever go away? To make it worse, imagine if that pill costs hundreds of thousands! You for sure would like to give the pill only to those patients that we know that it would actually do the job.
The project is a collaboration between a danish company and DTU, and I have been working on the project before starting my PhD. Before that, I studied in Denmark for my Master's degree. I started my academic career in Greece, where I also come from.
In my presentation, I will involve the students with quizzes - and clearly show them that there is big hope in our fight against cancer! And that we have been a bit slow - or more correctly, working on the wrong direction - but now we know what we are doing. I intend to bring a positive tone on the matter, and also bring some real examples of how we look into whether a therapy works or not, which the students will have the opportunity to touch and observe.