Crucial Advancements: AI Model in the Works to Predict Aggressive Prostate Cancer

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. If you know me, one of my favorite things I like to talk about on the podcast is AI's use in healthcare and the way that we can actually use AI to help improve people's lives in a medical way.

0:41So today on the podcast, I want to talk about a really revolutionary study that is currently happening to help with prostate cancer, and it is using AI. So that's what we're going to be talking about on the podcast today. So without any further ado, let's jump into it. So the major, I guess, headline on this story right now is the fact that the United States Department of Veteran Affairs, or the VA, is working to make an artificial intelligence tool capable of predictive, essentially capable of predicting aggressive prostate cancer. So this tool is going to be the product of a study which is spearheaded by researchers from five different VA medical centers.

1:20and I think something that's really important to note when we're kind of looking at this you know this problem overall is that prostate cancer actually affects one in eight men in the U.S. during their lifetime and as someone who has you know many people I know and love have been affected by cancer of all kinds and I'm sure you know there's many people all around the world and a majority of people know someone right that this has been affected that has been affected by this so I think this study and what's about to happen here is really exciting of course for prostate cancer, but also I think the implications of using AI to help detect all sorts of cancer and help to treat it is really, really exciting to me.

1:56And I think this is a massive win for AI and a massive net positive that the globe is going to see because of this. So I think, you know, prostate cancer is a very prevalent health concern among, you know, veterans or it's among everyone, but veterans is kind of who the VA is currently focusing on because it's the, you know, Office of Veteran Affairs, but it's actually the second most common cancer diagnosis in the United States, and it contributes to 30 % of new cancer diagnosis according to the VA's data. So the study that they're currently doing, it is called Predicting Monastic Progression of High-Risk Localized Prostate Cancer, and the study specifically plans to essentially just thoroughly scrutinize data from over 5 ,000 veterans who have been diagnosed with high-risk prostate cancer and that they've already started treatment.

2:49So I think what's interesting is this research is actually expected to, they're going to expand it to 14 different VA sites in its later stages, which is really awesome. They have a very large reach. They have a lot of data that they're going to be able to use. And powering the algorithm with high-resolution scans of prostate biopsies,

3:12Diagnostic Imaging and Social Determinants of Health, or SDOH. So the study essentially is going to try and identify patterns in aggressive prostate cancer. And the VA's existing resources include, you know, they have databases of all of this sort of medical data. They have a lot of computing infrastructure and cloud storage. And that is, I think, is actually going to be really instrumental in supporting kind of the data analysis of this and making this study very successful. So Matthew Rettig, who is a chief of oncology and hematology at the Greater Los Angeles VA Medical Center, he's also a co-principal investigator for the study, but he stressed the importance of this digital data repository.

3:55He is what he said in a quote. He said, the infrastructure developed by this research will serve as a valuable hub for future discovery and serve as a roadmap to develop similar AI algorithms for other cancers, such as lung cancer, and even non-cancerous diseases that commonly affect our veterans. So that's what I'm so excited about is, you know, this kind of hub of data that they're creating and these algorithms that they're developing won't just be used for this, you know, this type of cancer, but for other cancers and it's for future research that will be done, which I think is really, really awesome.

4:31According to the VA's press release that they recently did on this, the research is also going to leverage programs and partnerships such as the Million Veteran Program and the Prostate Cancer Foundation VA Partnership. And the study really aligns with the VA's, you know, Precision Oncology Program for Cancer of the Prostate, which is a program focused on utilizing genetic information to customize treatments for veterans with advanced prostate cancer, which I think is a really interesting area to look into with healthcare, right? It's like all bodies are not the same and all healthcare can't always be the same.

5:06So being able to treat people with hyper-customized treatments for genetics and all sorts of other things, I think can be a really powerful tool that I actually think AI is going to help unlock in healthcare. Being able to use AI to determine patterns of, you know, what types of, what types of person with, you know, different genetic traits respond to different drugs and medicines differently, I think is going to be really, really interesting. So Carolyn Clancy, she is the Veterans Health Administration's assistant or the VHA under Secretary for Health for Discovery. She said that the unique opportunity presented by the VA's resources is really impressive.

5:49This is what she specifically said. She said, only in the VA can a researcher combine extensive electronic medical records, high-performance computing, and precision oncology care to create an innovation like this AI program. She also pointed out that this is going to be the first time that socioeconomic conditions have been included in a predictive model for high-risk prostate cancer, which is interesting and dependent on the outcomes of that. It might be something that is implemented into other studies. So I think this is absolutely exciting. you know, this isn't the first time the VA has tried to address prostate cancer.

6:22Obviously, this is a big issue. A lot of people have tried to tackle this from a lot of different ways. But a lot of previous collaborations have focused on, focused essentially on, you know, aiming to enhance prostate cancer care by leveraging genomic data. And I think that what's really interesting here is just the fact that this is really one of the first studies, though because you know previous ones have done the genomic data and also environmental lifestyle factors for precision medicine-based treatments but this is going to be one of the first times that we're really integrating AI and building out a model and running it to help us in this you know quest to help with prostate cancer so I think this is very exciting this is an incredible use case for AI this is one that I am all on board with you know I love it when AI is used in healthcare we've seen it used in a number of very incredible ways to discover drugs AI has been used to help discover a number of drugs for a lot of different treatment for a lot of different ailments And kind of discover the compounds and chemicals that can be used for the treatments So I think that's a really incredible use case And I think that you know developing these AI models for cancer is going to be even more exciting So I cannot wait to see where AI takes healthcare in the future and how this you know overall helps the global population