Funded by Cancer Research UK, the CanRisk programme explores how genetic, lifestyle/hormonal and clinical risk factors can be combined to predict the likelihood of a person developing breast and/or ovarian cancer.
The CanRisk tool, developed by the Centre for Cancer Genetic Epidemiology in collaboration with healthcare professionals, is a user friendly tool for use in primary, secondary and tertiary care. It allows healthcare professionals to calculate a patient’s future risk of developing breast or ovarian cancer and the likelihood of carrying mutations in the moderate to high risk genes (e.g. BRCA1).
In late 2019, the CanRisk tool achieved its CE marking for use in the UK and EEA. Our work was integral to evaluating the tool in primary care and specialist genetics settings and can be found here. The tool is now available for use by healthcare professionals (register here).
Although the tool is now being widely used in a variety of clinical settings all across the world, our evaluation identified that there were opportunities to further optimise the tool for use in primary care. As a result, we are currently working on two projects. The first looks at how best to communicate cancer risk in time limited primary care appointments. The second is an NIHR School for Primary Care Research funded project which aims to refine the presentation of management guidance related to chemoprevention. Both studies should be published in 2021.
Latest Publications
Carver T, Hartley S, Lee A, Cunningham AP, Archer S, de Villiers CB, Roberts J, Ruston R, Walter FM, Tischkowitz M, Easton DF. CanRisk Tool-A web interface for the prediction of breast and ovarian cancer risk and the likelihood of carrying genetic pathogenic variants. Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention Biomarkers. 2020. doi:10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-20-1319
Archer S, Babb de Villiers C, Scheibl F, Carver T, Hartley S, Lee A, Cunningham AP, Easton DF, McIntosh JG, Emery J, Tischkowitz M. Evaluating clinician acceptability of the prototype CanRisk tool for predicting risk of breast and ovarian cancer: A multi-methods study. PloS One. 2020. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0229999
Carver T, Cunningham AP, Villiers CB, Lee A, Hartley S, Tischkowitz M, Walter FM, Easton DF, Antoniou AC. pedigreejs: a web-based graphical pedigree editor. Bioinformatics. 2017. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btx705
For more information on CanRisk please contact: Stephanie Archer