European Cancer Consortium Launched

Six of Europe's top cancer centers have launched a new collaboration to share patient data and foster research on treatments.

Unlike many institutional collaborations, which are usually temporary and dissolve after the projects are complete, Cancer Core Europe will be durable and involve substantial integration among the members, says Alexander Eggermont, MD, PhD, of the Gustave Roussy Cancer Campus Grand Paris in France.

Along with Gustave Roussy, Cancer Core Europe includes the Cambridge Cancer Centre in the United Kingdom; the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden; The Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam; the Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology in Barcelona, Spain; and the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg.

The centers aren't merging their daily operations, but they are creating what Eggermont terms an “e-hospital,” in which researchers at the six institutions will have access to patient data from the other partners. To ensure that information is compatible, the centers plan to adopt uniform protocols for obtaining biopsies and storing the results, performing molecular diagnostics, monitoring patients' immune function, and carrying out other key procedures.

“We will have a common standard of material that we can trust that will allow us to share our data,” says Eggermont. A collaborative effort with this degree of interconnection “has never been done before,” he says.

One of the benefits of Cancer Core Europe, organizers say, will be more potential participants for clinical trials. Each year, the hospitals enroll 60,000 new cancer patients and treat between 250,000 and 300,000 people.

Given these numbers, the project “has already attracted quite a bit of interest from the pharmaceutical industry,” says Carlos Caldas, MD, of the Cambridge Cancer Centre, who is also one of the consortium's organizers. A larger pool of patients, for example, might help researchers test targeted therapies.

By combining forces, researchers might also be able to determine which cancer treatments are most effective. Health care funders increasingly demand this information, but definitive answers are hard to come by, Eggermont says, because cancer treatment is so complex, involving multiple approaches such as chemotherapy, surgery, radiation, and immunotherapy. By prospectively creating annotated databases of patient information, the project meets the requirements for this kind of outcome research, he says.

The centers are providing the initial funding for the collaboration, but the group intends to seek European Union grants. Within the next few months they plan to choose a scientific director to supervise the integration of their data and procedures. Cancer Core Europe should be up and running within 3 years, Eggermont says. After that, the partners may look to add new members and perhaps create a Europe-wide virtual cancer institute, he says.

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