WHEN Glasgow surgeon Campbell Roxburgh pulls on his charity fundraiser t-shirt, he thinks of his mum.
Christine Roxburgh, a former GP, sadly died from oesophageal cancer when she was just 62.
“My mum was taken too young,” says her son. “I was just at the end of my PhD and training as a surgeon when she died.
“She saw me graduate as a doctor, she was around when my first child was born - but now I have three children. There are so many more memories I would have like to have shared with her."
He adds: "She had more life to live and that is the sadness of cancer.”
Professor Roxburgh and his team at the University of Glasgow have been awarded more than half a million pounds to develop an AI tool which will improve treatment for people with rectal cancer, a type of bowel cancer.
Around 4000 people are diagnosed with bowel cancer each year in Scotland.
The £505,414 grant from Stand Up to Cancer, a joint fundraising campaign by Cancer Research UK and Channel 4, will fund artificial intelligence technology which could predict more accurately who will respond to treatment by picking up tiny changes in tissue samples impossible to detect by the human eye.
The state-of-the-art technology may spare some people from having life-changing surgery.
Kirkintilloch gran Irene Hannah was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2019 after completing the screening test which is sent out to everyone aged between 50 and 74.
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She had a six-and-a-half-hour-long operation at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, which was a success but developed sepsis during the chemotherapy treatment which followed.
Irene was in hospital for four weeks and was only well enough to return home in late February 2020, just before the Covid-19 lockdown.
“I was in pieces when I was diagnosed with cancer,” she says. “I didn’t have symptoms so my cancer would not have been detected if I hadn’t returned the bowel cancer screening test.
"I’d urge people to return their screening test if they can.”
She added: “I went through some of the toughest moments of my life during the pandemic. I welcome new scientific research, which may lead to gentler, more personalised treatments in the future for patients.”
Irene is now in remission from cancer and in May, she celebrated her 70th birthday with a family party. She has had two new grandchildren since she was treated successfully for cancer – the newest, Hailey, was born in August.
“Life-saving research has given me more moments with my family,” she says.
Professor Roxburgh, who is a surgeon at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, says a cancer diagnosis can be “an incredibly difficult and worrying time" for patients.
He adds: “There should be no one-size-fits-all scenario, it’s vital we move towards a more individualised approach.
“If you cure patients successfully, they’ll have the rest of their lives to live with the after-effects of their treatment.
“Younger people are getting rectal cancer. That’s a phenomenon which exists across Europe and America. There’s a lot of work underway to understand why this is happening.”
He adds: “Our goal is to develop a non-invasive tool using biological data combined with imaging data and deep learning technology. This could lead to a new way to assess rectal tumours to personalise and improve treatment.”
Find out more at su2c.org.uk/get-involved.
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