A promising future for early cancer diagnosis
The University of Exeter would like to warmly thank David Walton and alumnus David Higgins (Law, 1990) and his wife Kirsten Higgins for their generosity in supporting vital cancer research projects being conducted within our University.
David Walton gave £400,000 in 2021 to the Hideko Walton project, a postdoctoral research project, led by Professor Willie Hamilton and Dr Sarah Bailey, that aims to achieve earlier cancer diagnosis.
David and Kirsten Higgins also generously donated £195,000 in 2021 and a further £130,000 in 2023 to support a postdoctoral fellowship in Cancer Diagnosis, again led by Dr Sarah Bailey, named The Higgins Family Programme.
Both projects are having a huge impact on life-saving research, and we could not be more grateful for their support.
The Hideko Walton Project
David Walton is co-founder of an award-winning digital marketing agency based in Japan. He set up the company with a group of friends, including Exeter alumnus Tom Morgan (Business Economics, 1999).
David wanted to support practical implementation projects that achieve earlier cancer diagnosis. The Hideko Walton project encourages GPs to consider cancer when they may not otherwise have done so, to prompt earlier referral and, ultimately, earlier diagnosis. The research can be applied not only in the UK, but also in other countries with different healthcare systems, such as Japan.
In this project, the team are working with local NHS partners to develop a new tool to flag patients with abnormally high platelet counts and offer them the right tests to identify cancer sooner. The team have collected and are analysing local data so that they can estimate the impact of the new tool; how many patients would it flag annually? How many more cancers could be diagnosed? What would the extra cost be for the NHS, and what would the impact be for patients?
The results so far are very promising; around 7% of individuals flagged by the tool have an undetected cancer, and about half of these are emergency diagnoses (associated with the poorest survival). Using the new tool, we hope that we can find these patients at an earlier stage and avoid those emergency diagnoses.
The Higgins Family Programme
The Higgins Programme has been running for more than two years. The broad aim of this research is to develop new strategies to diagnose cancer sooner, including risk prediction tools. The team are also studying how genetic risk of cancer could be used to help guide decisions on how to investigate patients’ symptoms.
The team’s work on cancer risk in patients with chronic health conditions has identified important clinical signs of cancer for patients with diabetes, high blood pressure, lung disease, heart disease, and mental health conditions. These findings are likely to change health guidance on investigating cancer symptoms in the UK healthcare system.
The programme has also supported key researcher Sarah Bailey in her career. Her important research in this field has led to her promotion to Associate Professor and given her the opportunity to earn the Royal College of General Practitioner’s (RCGP’s) Outstanding Early Career Researcher of the Year award. Sarah formally accepted the award at the RCGP’s annual conference in Brighton this year.
‟I’m delighted that our paper has won this award. Our research found that a substantial number of people could have their cancer diagnosed earlier with the discovery of this risk marker. This really could make a difference in achieving earlier diagnosis.”
Dr Sarah Bailey.
