Fujitsu and Aichi Cancer Center Develop AI System to Offer Patients Personalized Cancer Treatment

Aichi Cancer Center and Fujitsu Limited today announced the development of an AI solution able to select effective medical treatment from a wide range of drugs based on patients’ individual cancer types and various genomic variants.

The effectiveness of the new solution has been verified in clinical trials by physicians at Aichi Cancer Center.

With current cancer genomic medicine in Japan, treatment plans are considered based on the patients’ unique circumstances, including the type of cancer and the actionable genomic variants detected in cancer cells.

Specialists for cancer drug treatment thus rely on their own experience, knowledge, and medical literature to study treatment strategies in order to find the best possible medication for the patients’ individual conditions.

Test data of effective medical treatment of different cancer types and genomic information in external databases, which are sorted and managed based on different keywords and rules, remain difficult to use.

Combining the know-how of Aichi Cancer Center in drug selection and Fujitsu’s AI-based data-integration technology, the new solution is able to sort and combine these data under common keywords and a single data format and generate a structured data of knowledge, called Knowledge Graph, in order to find the medications that are likely to be highly effective for each patient.

Aichi Cancer Center and Fujitsu anticipate that the new solution will contribute to a significant reduction in the time required for physicians to estimate the effectiveness of drugs in a clinical setting, as well as to conduct research about data that can be used as evidence for their estimations. It will furthermore help physicians to effectively and precisely choose the medicine expected to achieve the best results based on patients’ genomic variants and to achieve better results by avoiding unnecessary treatments.

Aichi Cancer Center and Fujitsu will continue cooperation to further enhance the application of AI technology in cancer genomic medicine in order to contribute to further achievements in this field.
Background

Cancer is the leading cause of death in Japan, and the number of new cases now exceeds one million per year with the trend rising in recent years.

Therefore, cancer genomic medicine or precision oncology, a form of personalized medical care based on the genomic variants in each cancer, has been gaining increasing attention. Although a nationwide system to enhance cancer genomic medicine has been established in Japan, the shortage of specialists in this field represents a major issue.

The current situation thus demands further expansion of programs to train medical specialists as well as the development of an AI with capabilities comparable to those of medical specialists in order to support more effective medical treatment.

In November 2019, Aichi Cancer Center and Fujitsu concluded a comprehensive joint research agreement (4) in order to drive the application of AI technology in the field of cancer genomic medicine and jointly promoted R&D of technologies and systems applied during clinical tests.