The smartwatch that you wear could be the link to improved, more personalized cancer care, UVA Cancer Center scientists informed. A team of UVA Health scientists has verified the potential of wearable and mobile devices such as smartwatches and smartphones to aid doctors modify treatments to the requirements of individual patients. The scientists found that they can use wearable devices to forecast patients’ levels of cortisol, insomnia and stress hormone.
Results from their laboratory research indicate that patients with pancreatic cancer who have elevated cortisol levels from interrupted sleep will experience faster growth of their tumors; this indicates that doctors could control this data from patients’ mobile devices to assist at-risk patients retain their cortisol levels down and, in turn, slow their tumor growth.
Although the work is still in the initial stages, the UVA researchers say their efforts prove the incredible potential of “mobile sensing” for refining and individualizing cancer care. As so, they have created an ambitious strategy that would bring together specialists in many different fields—from psychology to engineering/data science to oncology—to exploit on the untouched potentials of devices that most of us already carry or wear on our wrists.
The idea is that this might one day lead to customized cancer treatment that is tailor-made to the social health profile of the specific patient, said researcher Philip I. Chow, Ph.D., of the University of Virginia School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences and UVA’s Center for Behavioral Health and Technology.
Patients are diverse in terms of their mental and physical health. Conditions like insomnia and distress could be significant factors in how fast a patient’s tumor grows and how resilient it is to cancer treatments. We’re trying to development a more detailed model of maintenance that takes into consideration a patient’s health profile when making choices about their treatment in order to advance outcomes. It’s a bit outside-the-box thinking, and to our information nobody else is undertaking it.
In a new scientific tabloid, Chow and his collaborators, including UVA’s Dan Gioeli, Ph.D., a cancer biologist and co-principal investigator on the investigate, argue there is strong but unfulfilled potential to connect people’s mobile sensing data to advance our understanding of their cellular and biologically created diseases. This, they say, has been made conceivable by new innovations in our capability to model cancer tumors.
Statistics about patients’ hormones from wearable and mobile devices could be fed into such structures so that doctors could have record insights into an individual patient’s ailment and cancer development, the researchers inform.
By utilizing a scheme that models how tumor cells grow (called the tumor microenvironment system, or TMES), the UVA team discovered that pancreatic cancer cells bred much quicker in individuals with high cortisol from interrupted sleep. But there are numerous other potential uses of the technology, from understanding how patients’ behaviors change their cancers to helping fundamental cancer research, the researchers indicate.
By the combination of diverse scientific disciplines, we can more efficiently model cancer in the laboratory and then perhaps learn, one, how a patient’s cancer will answer to detailed therapies and, two, how helping control a patient’s sleep or stress levels can influence that therapy, said Gioeli, of UVA’s Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Cancer Biology. It is extremely exciting to be working on a team of researchers with such varied expertise to do something exclusive and potentially impactful for patients.
The UVA scientists predict that one day soon patients may wear a smartwatch linked to an app on their phones that would securely communicate encrypted data to their health care providers. Artificial intelligence would estimate their hormone levels from their interactive patterns, and those levels would be presented in their electronic health archives so that clinicians could leverage the data to make the best care choices.
Continuously monitoring patients’ fundamental hormone levels has huge potential for refining their care, given how impactful they are to cellular function and body systems
Chow said, this work is the outcome of a partnership across multiple disciplines, including psychological and behavioral health, engineering, data science, medical oncology, surgical oncology and cancer biology. By joining our expertise, our goal is to advance cancer treatment that is more accurate and tailored to the individual patient.
