Investigating fungal infections in cancer patients receiving treatment in England - Pfizer

What is the health issue?

Cancer directly affects thousands of people in the UK, with over 457,000 new cases and nearly 180,000 deaths in 2020 alone. Cancer treatment can weaken the immune system, making patients more prone to infections. Significant research has been done on the effects of cancer treatment on bacterial and viral infections, but less has been done to understand fungal infections. Fungal infections have recently gained recognition as a growing threat to public health. They are also linked with substantial healthcare costs, as well as the growing issue of antimicrobial resistance.

What are the researchers trying to find out?

Researchers from Pfizer are aiming to identify the number of invasive fungal infections (IFIs) in patients being treated for cancer, the number of adverse effects in those patients and how these is affected by the type of cancer and the treatment a patient received.

Why does the research require the use of health data?

To be able to evaluate the impact of IFIs in people of different ages, ethnicities and medical histories in all parts of England, it is essential to have access to a large number of representative anonymised cancer patient health records. By analysing anonymised patient data from NHS England’s Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) and the Systemic Anti-Cancer Therapy (SACT) datasets, researchers can better understand the relationship between cancer treatments and fungal infections.

How is the research being done?

This study is using anonymised health data to better understand the relationship between cancer treatment and the number of IFIs. For patients who had IFIs, researchers are also analysing the costs of treatment and the risk of death due to the infection. Further analyses will help to understand the effect of patient characteristics such as ethnicity, gender and level of deprivation on these results.

Why will the results matter?

Findings from this research will give doctors more information about the treatment of cancer patients with IFIs in hospital. It will help doctors choose better medicines for cancer patients in the future which might lower the chance of patients getting an IFI while in hospital. These results will enable the NHS to understand which groups of cancer patients are most likely to be affected by IFIs and improve care pathways.

Further information

This case study has been adapted from the study: Incidence and characteristics of invasive fungal infections in patients being treated with Systemic Anticancer Therapies (SACT) in England. 

Glossary

Anonymised data: data where personal information has been removed from data so that individuals cannot be identified. This process ensures privacy and confidentiality, making it safe to use the data for research or analysis without revealing who the data belongs to.

Antimicrobial resistance: when microorganisms like bacteria, viruses and fungi evolve and no longer respond to antimicrobial medicines, making infections harder to treat.

Invasive fungal infections (IFIs): Infections where fungi, like yeasts or moulds, invade normally sterile parts of the body, such as blood, tissues and organs