Professor Niall Tebbutt has been awarded the Gastric Cancer Research Grant (including Linitis Plastica) to develop and apply artificial intelligence (AI) based image analysis for scoring PD-L1 immunohistochemistry in Gastro-Intestinal Cancer.
The $100,000 grant was awarded to Professor Tebbutt at the 23rd Australian Gastro-Intestinal Trials Group (AGITG), Annual Scientific Meeting (ASM). This funding will go towards ensuring that gastro-intestinal cancer patients receive the most efficacious personalised therapy, providing patients with the most effective outcomes in treatment.
Many studies across multiple cancers using immunotherapy drugs have already shown that expression of the PD-L1 protein to be an important predictive biomarker, but up until now, this approach has proven to be technically challenging, both from a pathology capacity perspective and a financial one.
However, by using AI and harnessing the capabilities of computers to undertake visual and spatial analysis, Professor Tebbutt’s research will combine digital pathology with artificial intelligence – a supervised machine will learn to develop an algorithm enabling a computer to derive the combined positive score (CPS) of gastric cancer. The potential outcome of using an AI algorithm to determine CPS will be more consistent, faster and cheaper assessments which could then be made more broadly available in both routine clinical practice as well as clinical trials across the AGITG network.
The initial phase of Professor Tebbutt’s research will train an AI model on a training dataset, and the study will then compare standard pathologist-based testing of the expression of the protein PD-L1 against the predicted output from the trained AI model. If the AI based method is effective, it could enable a more systematic, higher-throughput and cheaper method to identify populations of gastric cancer patients suitable for immunotherapy based on PD-L1 expression.
Professor Tebbutt says: “There’s no doubt in my mind that over the course of my career we’ve seen improvements in treatments for patients. Given the constant evolution of technology and the enacting change in the world of medicine, I’m very hopeful that this trial will ensure the application of artificial intelligence becomes best practice when deciding optimal treatment for GI cancers,” says Professor Tebbutt.
Doctor Lorraine Chantrill, Chair of the AGITG, says “Many congratulations to Professor Niall Tebbutt. His research has the scope to turn the treatment of rare cancers like Linitis Plastica and Signet Cell Ring Carcinoma on its head. Allowing pathology departments to work more effectively and offer patients personalised treatments, affording them much better outcomes. A real win -win.”
Source: AGITG
