Associate Professors Paul Kennedy and Dan Catchpoole were honoured with the Big Data, Big Impact Grant at the Premier’s Awards for Outstanding Cancer Research on Friday 7 August, hosted by the Cancer Institute NSW. They have been recognised for their work in personalised case management in the area of childhood cancer.
Paul Kennedy from the UTS Centre for Quantum Computation and Intelligent Systems has been working closely with Dan Catchpoole from the Kids Research Institute to come up with a virtual pipeline that visualises large quantities of patient data using the UTS Data Arena to help hospital clinicians better diagnose and treat childhood cancer patients.
Catchpoole said “The goal of this research strategy is to improve the health of children with rare diseases, in particular rare childhood cancers – such as childhood Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (ALL), neuroblastoma and rhabdomyosarcoma. We will achieve this by enabling clinicians to ‘make sense’ of complex biomedical data, to deliver more precise and personalised case management plans at the bedside.”
Catchpoole received the award on behalf of the team. He said the UTS Data Arena would allow them to interpret the data by providing a “lower dimensional” space to pick out new patterns of change that exist in individual patients.
About the research progress, Kennedy said "We've reached an exciting point in our research in that we're finally putting together all the bits and pieces we've been working on over the years. You don't always get the chance to work on things like this. It can have such a big effect and really change kids' lives. That's why it's such an honour to be doing this research."
The team will receive $60,000 and possibly an additional $150,000 (provided certain conditions are met) to fast-track their novel data research program.
The Big Data, Big Impact grand aims to inspire research teams to come together to devise new ways of conducting research using open access datasets.
The Cancer Institute NSW hosts the annual gala dinner to celebrate excellence and innovation in cancer research.
Chief Cancer Officer and CEO of the Cancer Institute NSW, Professor David Currow said, “Year on year, our state’s cancer researchers continue to lead the country and the world in many areas of cancer research. Their achievements are a combination of brilliant minds and unwavering determination to improve the lives of people affected by cancer. “