OnCo
ideasIdea

Accredited trusted research environments with curated cancer tables

Secure online workrooms where approved researchers can analyse cancer records without downloading them, with the data already cleaned and organised for cancer questions.

Trusted research environments (TREs) under the Five Safes model are now the default in the UK (NHS Secure Data Environments, OpenSAFELY) and emerging elsewhere. What is missing for oncology is curation: standardised, documented cancer tables (diagnosis, stage, treatment lines, response, death) refreshed on a schedule, so every study does not rebuild them. The proposal funds a small curation team per TRE and an accreditation standard for cancer-ready TREs.

Hypothesis
Curated cancer tables in a TRE reduce analyst time per study by more than half and increase reproducibility across studies using the same derivation code.
Rationale
OpenSAFELY showed that shared, versioned derivation code and a fixed environment produce fast, reproducible analyses at national scale during COVID-19; oncology has no equivalent curated layer.
What would test it
Give two analyst teams the same question, one in a TRE with curated tables and one with raw tables; measure time to answer and agreement of results. Repeat for five questions.
Maturity
being tested at scale
Who has to act
data
Cost to try
Medium ($1M to $50M)
Years to first evidence
2
Bottlenecks it attacks
  • Data silos · Records, scans, genomes and outcomes sit in separate systems that cannot talk. Every patient's experience is lost to the next.
  • Preclinical results do not reproduce · Fewer than half of landmark cancer biology findings reproduce when someone else tries.

Connected

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