ACTION on cancer

癌症死亡通常既缓慢又痛苦，很少有家庭能幸免于癌症的祸害。癌症也是世界上最大的杀手之一(到2025年，每年有1300万人死亡，2200万新病例)，据估计，地球上每两个人就会在一生中的某个阶段患上癌症。在过去的30年里，我们对癌症的了解大大增加，现在，我们第一次了解了这种疾病的根本性质(S)：癌细胞处理信息的方式发生了故障。我们身体中的所有细胞都会处理有关其内部状态的信息，并与邻居进行交流，当这种情况出现问题时，就会发生癌症。由于每个细胞都不同，这种信息处理可能会出错并导致癌症的方式非常不同，因此不可能设计出针对癌症的单一治疗方法，甚至是针对乳腺癌等亚类型癌症的治疗方法。相反，需要的是针对每个患者的癌症量身定做的个性化治疗。然而，这种个性化的治疗方法设计成本非常高，而且这样做的专业知识有限。此外，经常有必要进行定制设计的实验，以更好地了解什么是最好的治疗方法。因此，让每个人都能获得个性化癌症治疗的唯一方法是通过实验室自动化和人工智能(AI)的使用。在这个项目中，我们将开发ACTION，这将是一个用于设计个性化癌症治疗的原型AI系统。行动将专注于化疗-药物鸡尾酒的设计。给定关于癌症的初始信息，行动将从科学家开发的细胞信息处理的数据库和计算模型中提取它所能找到的关于癌症的所有相关知识。行动将合理地整合这些知识，并推断需要哪些额外的知识来做出如何治疗癌症的最佳决定。然后，ACTION将使用实验室机器人自动执行定制设计的实验，以确定丢失的信息。最后，利用它收集的所有知识，ACTION将决定最好的化疗方法。我们将使用实验室中培养的不同类型的癌细胞来评估ACTION。这避免了与病人合作的伦理复杂性，而且成本更低，速度更快。如果ACTION的开发成功，它将转移到对患者起源的癌症的测试。

Death from cancer is typically both slow and painful, and few families have been spared its scourge. Cancer is also one of the world's greatest killers (13 million deaths and 22 million new cases per year by 2025), and it is estimated that every second person on the planet will develop cancer at some stage of their life. Over the last 30 years our knowledge about cancer has increased enormously, and now, for the first time, we understand the fundamental nature of the disease(s): malfunctioning in the way that cancer cells process information. All the cells in our bodies process information about their internal state, and communicate with their neighbours, and when this goes wrong cancer can occur.As everyone's cells are different, and there are very many different ways that this information processing can go wrong and cause cancer, it is not possible to design a single treatment for cancer, or even for a sub-type of cancer such as breast cancer. Instead what is needed are personalised treatments tailored to each patient's cancer. However, such personalised treatments are very expensive to design, and the expertise to do so is limited. In addition, it is often necessary to execute custom designed experiments to better understand what is the best treatment. Therefore the only way to make personalised cancer treatment available to everyone is through laboratoryautomation, and the use of artificial intelligence (AI).In this project we will develop ACTION, which will be a prototype AI system for the design of personalised cancer treatments. ACTION will focus on chemotherapies - design of drug cocktails. Given initial information about a cancer ACTION will extract all the relevant knowledge it can find about the cancer, both from databases and computational models of cellular information processing that scientists have developed. ACTION will rationally integrate this knowledge, and infer what extra knowledge is required to make the best decision on how to treat the cancer. ACTION will then automatically execute custom designed experiments using laboratory robotics to determine the missing information. Finally, using all the knowledge it has gathered, ACTION will decide on the best chemotherapy.We will evaluate ACTION using different types of cancer cells grown in the laboratory. This avoids the ethical complexities of working with patients, and is much cheaper and faster. If the development of ACTION is successful it will then move to testing with patient derived cancers.