DECIPHER Health

There is increasing demand to develop a more personalised approach to diagnosis and treatment regimes for patients, such as those with cancer, so that treatment offered is based on the knowledge that it will be effective. The current “one size fits all” approach should not be applied to care and treatment when the tools that are now available can target the individual.

DECIPHER Health is a unique electronic data handling system that to enable this personalised approach by delivering sophisticated management and analysis of vast amounts of clinical, patient, imaging and genomic data, and subsequently providing a comprehensive picture of the genetic and clinical factors which affect a patient’s outcomes.

DECIPHER was born out of pilot work started in late 2010 to build a breast cancer informatics demonstrator system with the University of Dundee, a project which was funded by Cancer Research UK. Over the next two years DECIPHER Health will expand on this initial work to create an anonymised cancer Research Safe Haven and two clinical applications, encompassing consented patient cohorts from Lothian and Tayside with genetic profiling across six cancer types: breast, skin, prostate, ovarian, colorectal and lung.

DECIPHER Health is part funded by the Technology Strategy Board through a competition under the Stratified Medicine Innovation Platform umbrella, an initiative that oversees an investment of over £50 million of government funding in innovative research and development.