(CAN.HEAL) Building the EU Cancer and Public Health Genomics platform

Project summary

Genomics plays an emerging role in clinical and public health research. Cancer is strongly driven by genomic modifications, and wide-profiling of these modifications with new technological approaches has become a major asset for (early) diagnosis, prognosis and therapy in regard to personalised medicine. The Can.Heal consortium recognises that prevention, diagnosis and treatment should be approached in a concerted way for optimal benefit of patients and citizens. In the clinical arm in our project, we focus on applying ‘next generation sequencing’ technology and identify implementation paths to extend the application of genetic profiling of patients and tumour cells to allow harmonized data interpretation and facilitated treatment decisions. In the arm on ‘Genomics for Public Health’, the application of novel insights on estimating cancer risks in healthy populations by polygenic risk score analysis within population-wide interventions as well as strategies of remote genetic counselling and telegenetics will be further developed. Finally, we wish to set the framework for integrating and aligning the Genome of Europe biobanking initiative into public health genomics for cancer. We will further deepen the ethical and legal consents towards access to medical information and develop training tools on oncogenomics at large. Capacity building exercises will be performed in several countries.

From CAN.HEAL, we are able to apply the same or similar diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to patients with comparable cancer profiles across the EU, to take up the molecular tumour profiling biomarkers that estimate cancer predisposition to allow better counselling of family members regarding cancer risk. We will build on distinct use cases towards developing an integrated approach to improve access of individuals and cancer patients to prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer through personalised medicine.