Vicomtech participates in the LUCIA project, an initiative to understand lung cancer risk factors
The launch of the project took place in early February at the Technion facilities in Israel, where around 60 expert members of the consortium were able to share their vision of the project and show their enthusiasm for being able to participate in an initiative that focuses on one of the most aggressive and deadly cancers: lung cancer
Every thirty seconds someone dies from lung cancer, making it one of the deadliest diseases in existence; the five-year survival rate is 17% for men and 24% for women. To try to reverse this, the consortium, of which Vicomtech is a member, is working to improve the early detection and management of lung cancer by studying risk factors from exposure to individual biology in order to improve prevention strategies, help implement screening programmes, improve diagnosis and enable more precise medical approaches. “We are fortunate to have many skilled, outstanding partners from a variety of fields, and we will be working together for the next four years, applying a multidisciplinary approach, to further the understanding of the disease and develop methods to prevent, diagnose and treat it more effectively”, says Professor Haick, coordinator of the project.
The consortium, which has 22 members including health systems and hospitals, universities, research centers and companies, works together to identify lung cancer risk factors by focusing on three aspects: individual factors, including lifestyle and exposure to pollutants; external factors, such as the state of urban areas, traffic, climate and socio-economic aspects; and finally biological mechanisms, including genetic, epigenetic and metabolic changes.
Thanks to its expertise in artificial intelligence in healthcare, Vicomtech is the lead player in the research and development of AI models for the prediction of lung cancer risk factors, based on heterogeneous data such as clinical data, imaging, genomic information and exposome. In addition, Vicomtech will work leading medical image analysis in both CT and pathology, and, as leader of the digital platform work package that will include the core components for risk factor discovery, the Center leads the data ingestion, integration and harmonisation tasks and the lifecycle of the AI models.
The consortium is headed by coordinator Prof. Haick. Prof. Yuval Shaked from the Rappaport Medical School (Technion) is a partner in the consortium and is investigating the mechanisms of lung cancer to support early diagnosis of lung cancer.
Although there is a long way to go to find a definitive cure for such aggressive and deadly diseases, projects like LUCIA show that we are getting closer to the goal every single day.
