At the end of May, EOSC4Cancer achieved an important milestone: Interoperability between Federated European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA) and Cancer Core Europe validated by user group.

Leading this achievement was Work Package 2, under the guidance of lead authors Dr. Jan Korbel (EMBL) and Ms. Tolganay Kabdullayeva (EMBL). During the completion of this project, the main partner and consulting agency was the German Human Genome-Phenome Archive (GHGA), whose expertise helped to perform a better assessment of the critical points of this milestone. These pivotal points were:

1. Establishing a secure software infrastructure
2. A GDPR-compliant ethical framework
3. Decentralized collection and storage of data

The accomplishment of this milestone highlights harmonization needs for cancer datasets. This data harmonization was the main topic of the EOSC4Cancer Deliverable 2.3 Survey-based report determining annotation and harmonization needs. The survey-report highlighted the importance of common data standards, interoperbility, and addressed the challenges that come up with cancer data. Strategies to ameliorate cancer data harmonization such as drawing up common data standards, integrating data harmonization into current systems, and leveraging technology advances were identified.

This achievement was in complete coherence with the EOSC4Cancer project timeline. The next steps to take, based on the foundations laid out by this milestone, will be the implementation of the Maturity Level Model (MLM). Many congratulations and thanks to WP2 for their excellent work!