Australian Companion Animal Registry of Cancers (ACARCinom)

The Challenge

Cancer is a major cause of death in animals and humans. While cancer registries are commonplace in human medicine, veterinary cancer registries have been sporadic, short-lived and uncoordinated. 

Good data is essential to provide clinical and epidemiological evidence for evaluating the efficacy of current cancer treatment programs and developing intervention priorities.

The Response

This project created the Australian Companion Animal Registry of Cancers (ACARCinom), a national data asset comprising de-identified cancer records from major commercial and university-based veterinary pathology laboratories through a single companion animal cancer registry.

Focusing on cancers in dogs and cats, ACARCinom is a sustainable, unified, integrated and accessible data asset for identifying patterns and trends in animal and human cancers, as well as quantifying the role of predisposing risk factors. 

The project involved:

• data integration through an automated system for data capture with the  veterinary cancer data transferred to a central repository
• standardisation of the data processing workflow, classification and coding
• development of a web interface for researchers to access and use the ACARCinom database.

Watch a short explainer video about ACARCinom:

Who Will Benefit

Cancer research organisations, researchers, policymakers and government, veterinary clinicians and the veterinary industry are benefiting from access to transformed and de-identified veterinary cancer data accessible through an authenticated web interface.

Users of ACARCinom are able to conduct research for cancer risk mapping and ranking of predisposing risk factors for cancers in humans and animals.

The Partners

• The University of Queensland
• QUT
• University of Sydney
• Gribbles Veterinary Pathology
• IDEXX
• University of Adelaide
• Murdoch University

Further Resources

• Read the final project report.
• Learn more about this project on the ACARCinom website.
• ACARCinom was launched on 23 November 2023 at the St Lucia campus of The University of Queensland. Watch the highlights and the full launch video.
• Professor Chiara Palmieri, leader of this project, presented to the Australian and New Zealand Data Quality Interest Group on the work done to build ACARCinom, specifically data standardisation workflows and data dictionary or vocabulary. Watch the presentation.