CLOCS Annual Research meeting 2019

On 11^th September 2019, seven months after initiating the Cancer Loyalty Card Study (CLOCS),  we had a chance to showcase what we have been working on at our first annual research meeting. In brief, the work over the last six months has been to develop our brand and our website and complete our ethics application for this study.

We were very happy to have our patient representatives, collaborators, and the rest of the CLOCS team members, the representatives from Cancer Research UK, the press office from Imperial College London and the research nurses from the participating NHS Trusts at the meeting in London.

We kick started the day with an introduction from our Principal Investigator Dr James Flanagan with an introduction to the project, including the background and main hypothesis, a recap of the pilot study and the aims and methodology. We wanted to use this opportunity to generate dialogue on the future possibilities using commercial data in cancer research and also improve our attendees collected knowledge in how we can use loyalty cards in health related research. Thus, the second talk was from a high street representative on what their loyalty cards capture when the public purchases products, and how they have been collaborating with academia so far.

Our lead researcher, Dr Hannah Brewer, presented the details of the case-control study which is aiming to look at differences between 500 women with ovarian cancer and 500 women without ovarian cancer. Professor Sundar led the discussion on how to optimise patient recruitment to the case-control study with valuable input from the nurses and patient representatives. By lunch time, all the attendees were up-to-date with the progress we have made and coincidentally, at that moment we also received an email confirmation for favourable ethical opinion from the NHS Research Ethics Committee.

For the afternoon session, we invited guest speakers who lead innovative studies working on complex datasets, and from equally diverse disciplines of research. Professor Sara Faithful talked about the SHERLOC project and team of researchers, highlighting what they envisioned using commercial data, and how they will continue thinking outside the box. Dr Vasa Curcin, made us think about how artificial intelligence can be efficiently used in primary care to reduce diagnostic errors using decision support tools, and Dr Kirill Veselkov made us rethink why having a balanced diet with the good and the bad could save our life using the genetic signature of each unprocessed food with work from his Hyperfoods project . Dr Keselkov also raised the bar with what is possible with cinematic videos to support research! Dr Flanagan said

 We believe all these projects could help us build a research agenda in the future and CLOCS data can foster collaboration and facilitate better understanding of early diagnosis and cancer prevention.

Overall, the day was a success. The CLOCS team left with many ideas on improving study recruitment, the website and also generated lots of new ideas. We are looking forward to translating all the suggestions back into our project and start the recruitment of both patients and the control subjects. We are also looking forward to hopefully reporting some preliminary results at our next annual meeting in 2020.