Cancer cells from a patient at the university's hospital were more than just surviving.
VOA: special.2010.07.21
But only hours after the launch in Birmingham, Mr Blair faced the wrath of a cancer patient's distraught partner at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in the city.
The NCIN is a new project that will bring together up to 22 million NHS cancer records from the 30 cancer networks in England to create the world's largest patient-based cancer data.
Oncologists will be able to take a single tumor cell from a cancerpatient and determine within minutes or hours which aberrant genes are responsible for the cancer's growth, allowing them to customize therapy to the patient's particular genetic quirks, rather than having to guess which drugs might work best.