A new AI-driven way of identifying how patients with advanced bowel cancer will respond to a drug that was recently introduced by the NHS has been announced.

Researchers at London’s Institute of Cancer Research and the RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences in Dublin have developed the method with the goal of sparing potentially thousands of patients from being given drugs that would be ineffective in fighting their cancers.

In the UK alone, nearly 10,000 cases of advanced bowel cancer are identified every year, with young adults seeing a particular rise in diagnoses. Bowel cancer has the second highest mortality rate of any cancer, behind only lung cancer, and while survival rates can be as high as 98% when caught early, the five-year survival rate for advanced bowel cancer can be as low as 10%.

The study tracked 117 European bowel cancer patients who had been treated with chemotherapy and bevacizumab, a drug that was approved by the NHS in December. Bevacizumab works by slowing the rate at which cancer develops by depriving tumours of the proteins that they need to grow, but is only effective for a small pool of patients, and carries serious side-effects such as blood clots and gastrointestinal issues.

Using PhenMap, an AI tool that is a portmanteau of “phenotype” (an organism’s observable traits) and “mapping”, researchers have said they were able to “integrate complex data on the genetic makeup of the tumour”.

This allowed them to track patterns of how different patients reacted to the drug, as well as identify a group of patients who all had the same gene mutation and were all at a high risk of having negative reactions. Following this breakthrough, the scientists behind the tests now hope to expand the number of patient samples, as well as see if the results from the study can be used in the treatments other types of cancer.

Anguraj Sadanandam, a professor in stratification and precision medicine at the ICR, said: “Once bowel cancer spreads to other parts of the body, there are very few treatment options available for patients. It is therefore positive that patients can now access the targeted drug bevacizumab on the NHS.

“However, we know that the majority of patients won’t benefit from the drug, meaning thousands of people in England could be facing unpleasant side effects unnecessarily. Until now, we haven’t been able to identify these patients.

“Our research uses advanced AI methods to pull together large amounts of complex data, helping us to spot patterns that would otherwise be impossible for a human to see, and to uncover the clues hidden within a patient’s tumour. In our research, we have shown that this allows us to identify the patients least likely to respond to treatment with bevacizumab.”

But, while he said the findings were encouraging, he added that the tool would need to be tested on a larger cohort to be validated.

“In future, I hope this approach will lead to a test that can be used by clinicians, to ensure patients receive personalised care that has the highest chance of working against their cancer,” Sadanandam said.