Cancer Project Synergy Meeting
Better data management and exploitation stands at the front and centre of oncology data accessibility and research advancement. A strong strategic partnership between entities can improve oncology data integration and sharing: to achieve this goal UNCAN.eu (the European Initiative to Understand CANcer) and EOSC4Cancer collaborated on a synergy meeting, which took place at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre on January 17th. This meeting was the first step of an extensive collaboration, where participants discussed how the infrastructures of these two projects can reference each-other.
During the meeting a discussion was held on how EOSC4Cancer’s cloud framework could be a reference to UNCAN, and how this can serve to improve oncological data flows. Special attention was paid to mapping the European Cancer Projects which focus on data management. Here the main tasks were determined – Data hub building and hosting by UNCAN, Governance and Sustainability, and the build of a Federated vs Centralized model.
This way, the cancer research community and these larger European projects can work together to identify any impediments, sustainability strategies, data harmonization, and more. The collaboration of these two initiatives, as well as other projects like CAN.HEAL, EUCANCan, canSERV, B1MG, GDI, and AACR GENIE, aims to harmonize the initiatives and address inequalities in cancer research.
Hackathon
A biomarker oriented clinical trial database schema hackathon was held online on February 21st under the guidance of EOSC4Cancer Work Package 3, represented by Macha Nikolski (CNRS) and Eivind Hovig (University of Oslo). This event was held with the goal to brainstorm the development of infrastructures to support efficient clinical trials allocation. Current Clinical Trial databases are good sources of information, but they’re not designed for computational processing, may not update regularly, and might not capture the full complexity of the molecular markers. During this event, the participants analysed the scope of the current efforts, how they can be driven forward, and present challenges tackled.
A general data model was devised, as well as the plan for a new interface to support data curation. All the outcomes from this hackathon will be mirrored in the Deliverable 3.1 – The Molecular Tumour Board Portal Interoperability.
Cancer Landscape Partnering Meeting
The Cancer Landscaping Partner (CLP) Meeting was held online on February 24th, under the guidance of EATRIS, the T6.2 leader. 21 participants from 15 partners took part, discussing the statuses of the Work Packages so far, drafting a roadmap for EOSC4Cancer, and creating an e-Health data landscape. An overarching view of these goals was given in the form of two talks: Health RI by Jan-Wilhelm Boiten of Lygature, and a Summary of the UNCAN-EOSC4Cancer meeting given by Daniel Barrowdale of ELIXIR.
Going further, bi-monthly meetings will be held, constant feedback on the WP progress will be given, and input on key activities of the project will be collected. These actions aim to aid in the achievement of the aforementioned goals.
