Current Projects

Upper GI Data Cancer Network Controller

PLANETS Cancer Charity is proud to be supporting a pioneering new data-driven project designed to improve care and treatment for people with upper gastrointestinal (UGI) cancers across the South Coast of England.

With a donation of £62,265, PLANETS is co-funding a three-year research initiative led by the Innovation for Translation Research Group (ITRG) at the University of Southampton, under the leadership of Professor Tim Underwood, consultant upper GI surgeon at University Hospital Southampton.

A Collaborative Regional Effort

The project brings together expertise and data from University Hospital Southampton (UHS), Portsmouth Hospitals Charity , and Royal Bournemouth Hospital. For the first time, patient information from across these NHS sites will be securely and consistently gathered and linked, offering researchers and clinicians a fuller picture of cancer pathways across the region.

To support this, a new dedicated role – the Upper GI Data Cancer Network Controller – has been created and is now filled by Matthew Osadebamwen. His work focuses on acquiring and organising complex clinical data in a timely, accurate, and secure way, making it easier for healthcare professionals to use this information to guide care decisions.

Smarter, Faster Cancer Care

One of the project’s major early achievements is the development of a clinical dashboard, already being used at Southampton to support real-time decision-making during cancer multi-disciplinary team (MDT) meetings. This tool brings together key patient data in a single place, enabling more informed and personalised care decisions.

The dashboard helps doctors to:

• Track the quality of care across hospitals
• Spot issues early in a patient’s treatment journey
• Understand survival outcomes, including how long patients live after surgery

The key users of the dashboard include surgeons and clinical teams, quality improvement specialists, and researchersacross the region. By bringing this data together, the dashboard empowers healthcare teams to deliver better, faster, and more consistent care across Wessex.

As the project expands to include more patient data from Portsmouth and Bournemouth, the tool will become even more powerful and reliable. This will not only improve clinical decision-making but also serve as a model for similar systems in other cancer types and NHS regions.

Enabling Future Breakthroughs

By strengthening data infrastructure and collaboration, the project will also help boost access to clinical trials, especially for patients at sites where research involvement has traditionally been limited.

In the longer term, this work is expected to support the development of AI-assisted tools that will help doctors make faster, evidence-based decisions — and it will lay the groundwork for expanding into other cancers such as neuroendocrine tumours (NETs) and pancreatic cancers, which are also core focus areas for PLANETS.

Why It Matters

“This is exactly the kind of forward-thinking, collaborative research that PLANETS exists to support,” said Layla Stephen, PLANETS Director of Strategy and Finance. “By helping fund this vital role, our supporters are directly improving care and outcomes for people with cancer in our region — now and for years to come.”

Ongoing research into pancreatic cancer-associated diabetes:

PLANETS are funding (together with LAPR&D Charity) ongoing research into pancreatic cancer-associated diabetes, genetic variants and metabolomic analysis using the UK biobank cohort to help develop effective strategies for the early detection of pancreatic cancer, which is considered to have the worst survival outcome among cancers. Further innovative technology to predict people at risk of pancreatic cancer is particularly important for early detection.  The aim is that this research programme will identify a group of people who will benefit from a screening programme without major financial impact on the public health system

The NET Tumour Bank

We set up our tumour bank in 2010 with a charitable donation and PLANETS has supported it since 2011. We now have the largest bank of fresh frozen NET tumour samples in the UK and one of the largest in the world. This is an incredible resource of tumour material that we are now developing plans to use for genetic research in collaboration with Mr Alex Mirnezami from the Southampton University and Dr Chrissie Thirlwell. PLANETS are planning to fund the appointment of a full time lab based research technician to start this work, in conjunction with Ipsen the pharmaceutical company that developed and make Lanreotide. We are also looking at ways of detecting cancer cells as they start to spread in the circulation

The Pancreatic Tumour Bank

Following on from the success of the NET tumour bank, PLANETS  is now supporting the pancreatic tumour bank. We are currently in discussions with surgeons and researchers from the other major pancreatic cancer centres at Bart’s, Oxford, Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle into how we can join a collaborative research project that will look at mapping the genetic triggers for pancreatic cancer. This project has been funded nationally by the pancreatic cancer fund charity and supported locally by PLANETS who will provide funding for the lab based costs in Southampton. This is an amazing opportunity to be involved with some of the most important research in this field world wide.

Clinical assessment of the Delcath PHP Chemosaturation technique in patients with inoperable liver cancers

This isolates the liver from the rest of the circulation and soaks it in high dose chemotherapy before filtering the drugs from the blood and returning it to the circulation. We are the only centre in the UK using and evaluating this technique and one of fewer than 10 centres worldwide experienced in this highly complex treatment.