Origins of the CLOCS project
In December 2015, Cancer Research UK held their first Early Detection Sandpit Research Innovation Workshop.
The Sandpit event was an intensive 3-day workshop where 25-30 scientists were invited by Cancer Research UK to participate and brainstorm new ideas to tackle the topic of the meeting, which was “Harnessing Technology to detect Cancer earlier”. There was a lot of post-it notes on walls, pitching our ideas and working late into the night. Eventually we had to thrash out a grant proposal to pitch to the course directors at the end of the three days.
One of the great advantages of attending these Sandpit events, is that you can end up working with people you might not otherwise have met. Our "Guardian Angels" team consisted of Yasemin Hirst, a behavioural scientist from UCL, James Flanagan, an expert in cancer risk from Imperial College, Xin Shi, a statistician from Manchester Metropolitan Univiersity and Colin Johnson a computer scientist from University of Kent. Together we developed and pitched our idea for the "Guardian Angels Program".
Our idea was to investigate purchase data from high street retailers to see if we could understand symptom recognition by what cancer patients were buying to treat their symptoms prior to going to the GP. Our idea was funded and the pilot study was conducted over 2016/2017. The pilot study was recently published showing that the idea was feasible and acceptable to the general public.
In October 2017 we held an advisory group meeting with ovarian cancer patient advocates, academics, clinicians, representatives from the ESRC Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC, UCL), Public Health England, charities (Cancer Research UK and Ovarian Cancer Action) and several high street retailers to evaluate our pilot study findings and discuss future research grant applications. The meeting highlighted the priority of linking these novel datasets to understand ovarian cancer symptoms as well as the importance of a large scale prospective study which would lead to numerous research opportunities. These ideas were developed into what is now the Cancer Loyalty Card Study (CLOCS), which has been funded by the Cancer Research UK Early Detection committee.