Driving Excellence in Integrative Cancer Research through Innovative Biomedical Infrastructures

The vision put forward by the VPH Initiative is to promote personalized, predictive, integrative and evidence-based approaches to medicine. INTEGRATE shares this vision, and aims to build solutions that support a large and multidisciplinary biomedical community ranging from basic, translational and clinical researchers to the pharmaceutical industry to collaborate, share data and knowledge, and build and share predictive models for response to therapies, with the end goal of improving patient outcome. Moving away from empirical medicine, towards evidence-based personalized care has the potential to both dramatically improve patient outcome and to reduce costs. INTEGRATE aims to deliver to the biomedical community dynamic infrastructure components; tools for sharing and collaboration; standards-based data models; and repositories of data, models and knowledge.

INTEGRATE will enable:

  1. The collection, preservation, management and reuse of valuable biomedical data collected within multi-centric clinical trials. These unique comprehensive datasets will be made available through uniform interfaces to support information sharing and collaborative knowledge generation in a wide community of users.
  2. Multi-disciplinary collaboration, providing an environment and tools that support researchers across domains, institutions and industries to jointly contribute to research objectives, develop common methodologies and complex analyses, and efficiently make use of each other’s expertise.
  3. Collaborative definition of relevant clinical questions, set up of clinical trials, and more efficient validation of potential biomarker results and predictive models in clinical trials.

Collaborative development, preservation and sharing of multiscale validated predictive models of response to novel therapies and drugs.

We propose methodologies for model development, a modelling framework, and predictive multi-scale models developed in the context of clinical trials in breast cancer.

  1. PHILIPS ELECTRONICS NEDERLAND B.V. (PENB), Netherlands
  2. BREAST INTERNATIONAL GROUP – AISBL (BIG), Belgium
  3. FOUNDATION FOR RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY HELLAS (FORTH), Greece
  4. CUSTODIX NV (CUSTODIX), Belgium
  5. Institut Jules Bordet (Institut Jules Bordet), Belgium
  6. UNIVERSIDAD POLITÉCNICA DE MADRID (UPM), Spain