BrainChild – AI and health data to accelerate the development of better treatments for children with cancer

Since 2024, all children diagnosed with cancer have been offered whole genome sequencing. Sweden was one of the first countries in the world to offer this comprehensive examination, which generates large amounts of gene sequences. To make the best use of this information, BrainChild was created – a project initiated by the Swedish Childhood Cancer Fund and run and developed in collaboration with Genomic Medicine Sweden.

The goal is for more children with cancer to survive – and for them to do so with fewer side effects and a better quality of life. By collecting and structuring large amounts of health data, BrainChild aims to create the conditions for more accurate diagnoses and personalised treatments for children with cancer – and, in the long term, enable AI-based analysis.

BrainChild was started with the goal of creating a national platform for childhood cancer that links genetic data, medical images, and clinical information. The purpose of BrainChild is to facilitate research and support clinical decisions by collecting information that is currently often scattered across different systems. The project will both strengthen research opportunities and provide better decision support for healthcare. Since current legislation does not allow individual data to be shared freely between healthcare and research, BrainChild is currently run as a research project. The ambition is that, in the long term, the project will be able to support the development of future decision support with broad clinical application.

The project is integrating data from sources such as the Swedish Childhood Tumor Bioank and clinical registriesin a secure and scalable way. This makes it possible to analyse tumour biology and treatment effects more systematically. The platform is designed to link clinical information with several different types of large-scale data, such as genetic sequences and microscope images.

A central part of the BrainChild project is to be able to integrate and analyse large amounts of health data using AI in the future, for example to identify risks of recurrence or treatment side effects. The project is in the early stages of building a cohesive data ecosystem, where both research and healthcare can benefit from structured information.

The National Genomics Platform and BrainChild

BrainChild is closely linked to the National Genomics Platform (NGP), which serves as a technical and analytical platform for managing large-scale genomics data in Swedish precision medicine. In the work on next-generation childhood cancer care, BrainChild is an example of how advanced data analysis, whole genome data, and clinical information can be integrated to support both research and care. NGP is a central part of the infrastructure that enables BrainChild’s data-driven approach.