We have grown accustomed to the word ‘cancer’ as statistics show this diagnosis will be a reality for ‘nearly 1 in 2 people born in the UK in 1961’ (Cancer Research UK, 2025). Luckily, as our treatments and early diagnosis strategies improve, cancer is no longer a death sentence and, therefore, our aging population has increasingly higher numbers of cancer survivors. This has unmasked new features such as the appearance of second primary cancers: cancers that are not due to metastasis, have very poor prognosis and often affect similar organs. However, the understanding of second primary malignancies (SPMs) development is limited and due to their poor prognosis, SPMs could present a heavy burden on the NHS.
Our preliminary data from cell models support a link between drug resistances and healthy cell transformation and we want to analyse UK Biobank records to investigate this association further in terms of SPM incidence ratios.
Due to the nature of the data compiled in the UK Biobank, our project also aims to shed some light on the risk factors that might be supporting these second malignancies. We will focus on psychological factors, age, gender, socioeconomic status and biochemical factors, including treatment-resistances, available through Tier 1 access.
Overall, we plan to study associations between an array of psychological and sociological factors, treatment resistances and cancer development, calculating incidence ratios that, if elevated when compared to a control population, could guide effective interventions lifestyle and medical interventions.