Partner Projects

Creating collaborations and synergies with other projects and initiatives and learning from previous work done – this is a special focus of the p-medicine project. p-medicine is closely linked with the VPH and the computational oncology communities and has several project partners in other projects. It has a high level of interfacing and knowledge exchange and is involved in many European, international and national initiatives and Networks of Excellence, e.g. the VPH Network of Excellence (VPH NoE). p-medicine is designed to foster, harmonise and integrate pan-European research in the field of patient-specific computer models for personalised and predictive healthcare and ICT-based tools. These tools are used for modeling and for the simulation of human physiology and disease-related processes. It is the intention of p-medicine to build up an interactive collaboration with the VPH NoE to harmonise tools, methods and services in interlinking with the VPH Toolkit.

p-medicine – From data sharing and integration via VPH models to personalised medicine

Medicine is undergoing a revolution transforming the nature of healthcare from reactive to preventive. This change is catalysed by a new systems approach which focuses on integrated diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease in individuals eventually leading to a personalised predictive treatment. p-medicine brings together international leaders in their fields to create an infrastructure that will facilitate this translation from current practice to personalised medicine. For this purpose p-medicine has formulated a coherent, integrated workplan for the design, development, and integration of an open, modular framework of tools and services so that p-medicine can be adopted gradually.

This includes:

  • efficient secure sharing and handling of large personalised data sets
  • enabling demanding Virtual Physiological Human VPH multiscale simulations (in silico oncology)
  • building standards-compliant tools and models for VPH research
  • drawing on the VPH Toolkit and providing tools for large-scale, privacy-preserving data and literature mining, a key component of VPH research.

It is understood that privacy, non-discrimination, and access policies are aligned to maximise protection of and benefit to patients. The p-medicine tools and technologies will be validated within the concrete setting of advanced clinical research. Pilot cancer trials have been selected based on clear research objectives, emphasising the need to integrate multilevel datasets, in the domains of Wilms tumour, breast cancer and leukaemia. To sustain a self-supporting infrastructure realistic use cases will be built demonstrating tangible results for clinicians.

CHIC - Computational Horizons in Cancer

(Planned project start:  April 1, 2013)

CHIC proposes the development of a suite of tools, services and secure infrastructure that will support the accessibility and reusability of VPH mathematical and computational hypermodels.

Multiscale models and data will be semantically annotated using the ontological and annotating tools to be developed. An image processing and visualization toolkit, and cloud and virtualization services will also be developed. The CHIC tools, services, infrastructure and repositories will provide the community with a collaborative interface. This can be used for exchanging knowledge and sharing work in an effective and standardized way. A number of open source features and tools will enhance usability and accessibility. In order to ensure clinical relevance and foster clinical acceptance of hypermodelling in the future, the whole endeavour will be driven by the clinical partners of the consortium. Cancer hypermodels to be collaboratively developed by the consortium will provide the framework and the testbed for the development of the CHIC technologies. Clinical adaptation and partial clinical validation of hypermodels and hypermodel oncosimulators will be undertaken. Approximately 50 percent of the p-medicine partners will participate in the CHIC-project.

EURECA - Enabling information re-Use by linking clinical Research and Care

EURECA aims to enable seamless, secure, scalable and consistent linkage of healthcare information. This information resides in electronic health record (EHR) systems with information in clinical research information systems, such as clinical trials. Achieving semantic interoperability among EHR and clinical trial systems is at the core of the EURECA project as it is the basis for enabling many of the software services and tools developed in the project. The partners are working together to build software services that help to securely interconnect the two systems. Successful linkage will deliver several benefits for patients: early detection of patient safety issues and more efficient recruitment of eligible patients to trials. The systems will also enable long term follow up of patients. Approximately 50 Percent of p-medicine partners are part of EURECA.

INTEGRATE - Driving Excellence in Integrative Cancer Research through Innovative Biomedical Infrastructures

The INTEGRATE project aims to develop innovative infrastructures to enable data and knowledge sharing and to foster large-scale collaboration in biomedical research.

Flexible infrastructure components and tools will bring together heterogeneous multi-scale biomedical data generated through standard and novel technologies within post-genomic clinical trials. It will also provide a seamless link to existing research and clinical infrastructures, such as clinical trials management systems, eCRFs, and hospital EHRs.

Four p-medicine partners are part of INTEGRATE.

VPH-Share- Virtual Physiological Human: Sharing for Healthcare

VPH-Share will develop the organisational fabric (the infostructure) and integrate the optimised services to:

  • expose and share data and knowledge
  • jointly develop multiscale models for the composition of new VPH workflows
  • facilitate collaborations within the VPH community

VPH-Share and p-medicine have established a close cooperation and regularly exchange information with regard to cloud computing throughout the duration of both projects. VPH-Share aims to build a global infrastructure for other VPH projects so that they can become clients of them, which is also intended for p-medicine.