Combining biomedical data from breast cancer patients could lead to ‘groundbreaking discoveries’ in fight against disease

Understanding the characteristics of different variants of the disease could help to diagnose and classify patients and develop new personalised therapies

Studying combined data from the UK Biobank, a unique record of patient information from over half a million Britons, could help make ‘groundbreaking discoveries’ in the understanding and treatment of breast cancer, say researchers.

Understanding the unique characteristics of different variants of the disease could help doctors to diagnose and classify patients and develop new, more personalised therapies.

The UK Biobank is a vast database of health information – including clinical, genetic, protein, and metabolic data from volunteer participants.

However, scientists from the University of Strathclyde say there is more scope to study these data sets together to identify the unique biological features of different variants of breast cancer in the future.

The researchers reviewed studies from the past five years that used UK Biobank data to research breast cancer.

Their results, published in the Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal, found 125 studies, with 76 focusing on genetic data, and only two studies looking at protein and metabolic data. None used all types of data together to study breast cancer.

A closer look at the 76 genetic studies identified 2,870 genetic variants in 445 genes linked to breast cancer. Thirteen of these genes showed different changes in different types of breast cancer, and 59 were well-known breast cancer genes. These genes are involved in general cancer processes like DNA repair and gene expression.

The researchers say the lack of research focusing on the analysis of proteomics and metabolomics datasets could be because genetic data was more readily available than proteomic and metabolomic data.

In addition, combining different types of data is complicated, making it hard to take this ‘multi-omic’ approach in breast cancer studies.

The study involved researchers from the University of Edinburgh, Yale, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and NHS Lanarkshire, and was funded through the EPRSC Doctoral Training Partnership, Medical Research Council and the Royal Society.