ON CANCER

The burden of cancer is beyond the number of people affected, it is in the plans and dreams it destroys and the beautiful souls it annihilates while darkening the hearts of those who are related to the victims. Like most chronic diseases, many scientists have made it their life-long commitment to improving the prognosis of these cancers.

However, I think there is a caveat that is not judiciously utilised, as I would not want to state that it is rarely or never used. And that caveat is collaborative work amongst scientists and their studies. This collaborative work includes labs with their principal investigators (PIs) working together, beyond university or funding scopes, to answer specific questions that can bring humanity closer to finding a cure to this menace. But the biggest bane is the knowledge gap between all that has been done and the next questions that should be answered.

PIs, together with their team members, usually have questions they seek to answer based on the volume of knowledge they are aware of, which is limited. Here comes artificial intelligence (AI). The body of work on cancer ranging from case reports to wet lab works on tumour microenvironment and genomic sequencing to better understand the pathogenesis of cancers is huge. 

The bureaucracy that requires researchers to publish their works in specific and differing journals cannot be changed in decades. However, a unique database containing all articles, journals, essays, and reports related to cancer, should be designed with the help of AI. This unique database will utilise natural language processing (NLP) and other technologies required to read and understand these documents and finely summarise the important details in each of them.

This database will do a lot of good to the cause of man to curing cancers. Chief amongst these benefits will be the reduction of needless studies and better-targeted funding and research endeavours. The database will help researchers truly know what has been done, what is/should be next but much more importantly make connections between research works to find new answers without ever meeting such authors. AI, generally, has been making a lot of progress in different fields recently and its use in medicine should be optimised as much as possible. 

Nuances, specific to the writing technique of researchers, might be lost during this AI-engineered summarization of scientific works but its loss might not be tangible to the goal of cancer cure. Articles in high-ranking journals are usually not available without a fee, as most of us in low and middle-income countries are painfully aware, but this database with/without a fee will offer a compendium of these articles with a quick review for efficiency.

Companies should look into designing a platform to offer this service which can be further adapted to other chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension that affect a lot of us.