World Cancer Day - Students Explore Real Cancer Research

A group of our A Level students have been taking part in an ambitious cancer research project that introduced them to real-world data analysis and modern approaches to cancer treatment. Working with large patient datasets, Mara, Marie and Asa explored how outcomes vary across treatments such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy, immunotherapy and targeted molecular therapy. Students learned how to clean data, identify anomalies, and run statistical tests to compare results.

“Doing a project like this allowed us to understand how to work with real data. It was exciting to feel that our work could one day help someone,”

For many, this was their first experience handling medical research data at scale. Marie described the project as “fascinating,” especially as someone interested in studying medicine. Asa noted how valuable it was to work with such a large dataset and how the experience became a talking point in her university interview. Mara took the project even further by creating mathematical models to support early disease detection and analysing data using Python.

Beyond the scientific skills, the students highlighted how important it was to learn practical tools like Excel, data modelling and statistical interpretation, all of which play a major role in modern medical research.