The canSERV Consortium announces its first Challenge-Call on “Advancing Personalised Oncology”.

Deadline for submission is 25th of April 2023, 12:00 CEST.

Cancer Researchers in, and outside, the EU are invited to apply for free access to cutting-edge transnational services with an indicative overall budget of EUR 500,000.

The aim of this call is to accelerate knowledge gain in personalised oncology with specific emphasis on multi-level data-based treatment guidance linked to Molecular Tumour Boards.

The projects supported under this call will support the advance and implementation of personalised medicine strategies for all cancer patients in Europe, contributing to the overarching goals of the Cancer Mission Board.

Proposal topics

Proposals for this call should address either of the two challenges listed below:

• A) Data-driven treatment selection for localised tumours with multiple patient-derived data types to support novel treatment and diagnostics. 

Studying novel treatment and diagnostic options for localised cancer patients, e.g., colorectal cancer, typically involves highly diverse data sets (clinico-pathological variables, medical images, genomics and other omics, alternative experimental models, drugs, and clinical outcomes) collected either at one time point or repeatedly during therapy monitoring / follow-up.

Services to obtaining such data should support either individual treatment guidance within a Molecular Tumour Board setting or facilitate a generalisable concept for innovative treatment selection of localized, non-metastatic tumours.

• B) Precision treatment guidance for metastatic cancer, especially colorectal cancer, based on multiple sources. 

Different to the call above, this challenge addresses the metastatic disease stage with particular – but not exclusive – focus on colorectal cancer. The overall scenario and scope addressing novel treatment and diagnostic options using multi-modal data at single or multiple timepoints of individual patients or cohorts to foster knowledge gain for Molecular Tumour Board guidance applies like to the challenge call depicted under A).

This could include interpretation of the functional relevance of gene alterations observed in a patient’s tumour and identification of standard-of-care drug biomarkers and investigational treatment opportunities.

Details and application

To address at least one of the two challenges above with your research proposal, please apply for a combination of services provided by canSERV, ideally across our service domains in order to account for the intended multi-modal data approach.

Full details can be found in this linked pdf.

apply here

About BBMRI-ERIC’s involvement

BBMRI-ERIC is proud to coordinate the canSERV project. We work as part of a wide-ranging and innovative consortium of research infrastructures that seeks to make cutting-edge and customised research services available to the cancer research community EU wide, enable innovative R&D projects and foster precision medicine for patients’ benefit across Europe.