Cancer database could save thousands of lives It will bring together clinical information on all 350,000 cancers diagnosed in England and will include more than 11 million historical records of cases from as far back as 30 years ago, The Times reported. Jem Rashbass, who leads the Cancer Registration Service at Public Health England, hailed it as "the most comprehensive, detailed and rich clinical dataset on cancer patients anywhere in the world." He said: "This is game changing. This puts us at the forefront of cancer care for the next two decades. In effect, every cancer patient has a rare disease that is different in some way from another cancer. This allows us to carry out refined searches to see how other tumours have responded to identify the optimum treatment as early as possible. The database will be announced to hundreds of cancer experts at the Cancer Outcomes Conference in Brighton, hosted by the National Cancer Intelligence Network. Public Health England, which was set up as part of the NHS reforms, will have responsibility for it. The announcement follows a report by McMillan Cancer Support last week predicting half of all people in Britain will contract cancer at some point in their life by the 2020s. Four in 10 of them are expected to survive, in part because of medical advances.