Heard on the pipeline: Technology in oncology

It’s not every day that experts from across the oncology field gather in one place to discuss the past, present, and future of cancer treatment. So, when pharmaphorum editor-in-chief Jonah Comstock hit the floor at ASCO earlier this month, it was the perfect opportunity to find out what some of the brightest minds in healthcare think of one of the biggest trends in healthcare.

How do you see digital and AI technologies shaping the oncology space in the next three to four years?

Arun Krishna
AstraZeneca head of lung cancer commercial

The digital revolution in this medical space is here to stay. There are a couple of things that are very critical for us to move at pace. One is data. Internally within AstraZeneca or externally within hospitals and health systems, how is data captured, and is there connectivity in the data space?

Once you can connect data and follow the patients longitudinally through their journey, you can make a better-informed decision through machine learning or AI or all of that. So, I believe that we need to get the fundamentals right first, which is about data. And once we have data, I think machine learning and artificial intelligence can be applied to better understand and predict which patient may be responding to a treatment, which patient may not be responding, and how we get early markers in that space.

The other thing that I think is critically important, specifically in the lung space, is that patients get diagnosed earlier. When you look at US screening rates naturally, it’s less than 5%. So how can we use data, artificial intelligence, and other things to get patients screened earlier and detected earlier, so they can benefit from those treatments?

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