Computational Medicine Laboratory
ACGT
Category: european
Project Title: Advancing Clinico-Genomic Clinical Trials on Cancer: Open Grid Services for Improving Medical Knowledge Discovery
Funding Organization: EC
Programme: FP6-IP-No 026996
Programme Nature: 6th Framework Programm R&D project
Coordinator: GEIE ERCIM
Partners: FORTH-Greece, INRIA-France, UvA-The Netherlands, PHILIPS-The Netherlands, IJB-Belgium, SIB-Switzerland, LundU-Sweeden, UMA-Spain, UPM-Spain, FHG-Germany, BIOVISTA-Greece, UOC-Greece, UHANN-Germany, PSNC-Poland, CUSTODIX-Belgium, HEALTHGRID-France, ICCS-Greece, USAAR-Germany, SIVECO-Romania, FUNDP-Belgium, UH-Germany, UOXF-Great Britain, Uhok-Japan, IEO-Italy
Duration: 01/02/2006-31/07/2010
Total Budget: 17.685.539 Euro
FORTH ICS budget: 1.276.200 Euro
Project Objective: The completion of the Human Genome Project sparked the development of many new tools for today’s biomedical researcher to use in finding the mechanism behind disease. While the goal is clear, the path to such discoveries has been fraught with roadblocks in terms of technical, scientific, and sociological challenges. ACGT brings together internationally recognised leaders in their respective fields, with the aim to deliver to the cancer research community an integrated Clinico-Genomic ICT environment enabled by a powerful GRID infrastructure. In achieving this objective ACGT has formulated a coherent, integrated workplan for the design, development, integration and validation of all technologically challenging areas of work. Namely: (a) GRID: delivery of a European Biomedical GRID infrastructure offering seamless mediation services for sharing data and data-processing methods and tools, and advanced security; (b) Integration: semantic, ontology based integration of clinical and genomic/proteomic data - taking into account standard clinical and genomic ontologies and metadata; (c) Knowledge Discovery: Delivery of data-mining GRID services in order to support and improve complex knowledge discovery processes. The technological platform will be validated in concrete setting of advanced clinical trials on Cancer. Pilot trials have been selected based on the presence of clear research objectives, raising the need to integrate data at all levels of the human being. ACGT promotes the principle of open source and open access, thus enabling the gradual creation of a European Biomedical Grid on Cancer. Hence, the project plans to introduce additional clinical trials during its lifecycle. It is in line with EU priorities and the objectives of the IST program. It targets the fulfilment of urgent needs of the cancer research community, a key area of societal importance and with a view to strengthening the integration of the European Research Area.
