Our team of patients, pain doctors and engineers aim to deliver a simple, cheap and effective sense testing kit, that we are calling SenseCheQ. This will enable patients to check the health of their nerves, at home, during their chemotherapy. We will design SenseCheQ to be sensitive enough to detect early changes, potentially before the patient notices any symptoms, to enable personalised treatments that will maximise the success of cancer treatment, whilst minimising the risk of chronic pain and loss of sensation.
To deliver SenseCheQ we will have four complementary workplans:
Workplan 1 (UK wide) will be led and driven by patient partners to ensure that SenseCheQ is user friendly and meets the needs of patients. This workplan will also feed into the remaining workplan to ensure that patients remain at the centre of our focus.
Workplan 2 (Newcastle) will engineer solutions, by identifying and integrating off-the-shelf components into a suitable device and providing power and communications.
Workplan 3 (Bristol) will test these solutions in healthy volunteers. Initially, individual components will be tested alone and compared to commonly used sensory testing equipment. As designs progress, through testing and re-design cycles, this workplan will validate early SenseCheQ versions in models of nerve damage.
Workplan 4 (Dundee) will perform a feasibility study in patients recruited to the PAINSTORM project, another Versus/MRC Advanced Pain Discovery platform program of work. The PAINSTORM study will perform QST on patients as they have courses of chemotherapy. We will ask some of these patients to use the SenseCheQ device at home at the same time. We will be most interested in how patients get on with the device – is it easy to use? is it robust? We will compare SenseCheQ to the QST results to assess its ability to detect neuropathy.
If successful, we will apply for further funding to confirm these findings and thus move SenseCheQ towards a clinically useful tool empowering patients to monitor their own nerve health, at home, minimise their risks of developing chronic pain and numbness and enabling delivery of truly personalised cancer treatment.