On Friday, 21st of December, this year’s first Cancer Landscape Partners (CLP) Meeting was held, with members of the WP6 team in presence. The day’s agenda focused on clinical trials and clinical trial matching, the highlight being two presentations by Majd Abdallah and Norman Sabbah, followed by a discussion on data in clinical research.

After the welcome by Sarah Morgan of EATRIS, Majd Abdallah of the University of Bordeaux gave a presentation on “AI-powered Recommendation System for Matching Cancer Patients to Clinical Trials.” This tool for automated patient-trial matching will be of general purpose but specifically useful for clinical trials. It aims to provide a more accurate and all-encompassing way to match patients with relevant clinical trials of all stages. A major hiccup of clinical trials is patient recruitment since patients need to meet an array of criteria. Using this tool to match patients to trials will increase efficiency, accuracy, and scalability, allowing clinical trials to finish faster. 

The second presentation of the day was held by Norman Sabbah of Telemedicine Technologies. He represented the xShare project and shared his insight on “The role of the European Electronic Health Record Exchange Format (EEHRxF) in clinical research.” The EEHRxF aims to unlock the flow of health data across borders. Norman explored the contribution and usability of EEHRxF in research and clinical trials across three business use cases: study feasibility, patient prescreening, and study support. Find out more at the xShare project homepage.

The presentations were followed by a short open discussion on the presentations and the general implications of open data in research. This was another meeting rich in information and useful discussions. A big thank you to everyone who took part, and we look forward to the next CLP meeting!