Aide: Managing cancer as a chronic illness

Cancer management has evolved to resemble the management of long-term chronic conditions due to advances in medical technology, treatments, and early detection (American\_Cancer\_Society). Many patients now live with cancer as a manageable condition rather than a terminal illness. Modern cancer care now involves continuous monitoring, maintenance therapies, and lifestyle adjustments to manage symptoms and prevent recurrence, similar to chronic conditions like diabetes or heart disease. Patients require tools to self-manage their on-going condition, their specific cancer and targeted therapies/immunotherapies and the side-effects associated with this to enhance quality-of-life and extend survival. There remains a notable gap in tools specifically designed to support cancer survivors in managing the chronic aspects of their condition. Many survivors face long-term physical, emotional, and psychological challenges, such as fatigue, pain, anxiety, depression alongside the direct side-effects of their treatment. Issues frequently need to be considered/managed alongside other conditions/treatments. This project represents our ambition to expand the existing Aide platform, already used in the NHS to manage comorbidity, asthma and type-2 diabetes, with a specific cancer care platform to meet complexities of managing highly personalised patient condition and drug reaction profiles. We will begin with blood cancers (leukemia, lymphoma and myelomas), where advances in drug treatment, such as CAR-T cell therapy, bispecific antibodies, and targeted drugs require highly personalised care with complex regimens and side effect profiles, including severe toxicities. While these treatments offer significant improvements in survival they require ongoing management and often present complex side effects.