ELIXIR has launched a new Cancer Data Community to enhance cancer data accessibility, quality and interoperability. The Community brings together experts across ELIXIR with external partners to coordinate activities and build on ELIXIR’s existing cancer portfolio.
Cancer research is highly data intensive, making efficient data management essential to enabling precision medicine for European citizens. Genetic mutations play a key role in the formation of a tumour, and understanding the genetic basis of a cancer can lead to early testing, targeted prevention and therapies, new drug targets and faster clinical trials.
The new Community
The ELIXIR Cancer Data Community was established early in 2024, following the publication of the Community’s white paper. The Community brings together expertise and resources to gather, manage and analyse clinical and biomedical data. Led by Macha Nikolski (ELIXIR France), Eivind Hovig (ELIXIR Norway) and Fátima Al- Shahrour (ELIXIR Spain), with support from Daniel Barrowdale (ELIXIR Hub), the Community has three main aims:
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Disseminate existing open solutions
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Promote the adoption of global standards to ensure resource interoperability and support effective data sharing
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Promote the adoption and distribution of trusted standard and portable pipelines for cancer data analyses and interpretation
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Promote cross-project and cross-initiative collaborations
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Create strong connections with other ELIXIR Communities and with core ELIXIR resources (such as FAIR data and database interoperability, for example)
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Bolster the ongoing efforts for cancer use cases in different European projects both for research and towards cancer precision medicine
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Design and develop missing community standards
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Contribute to discoverability and facilitated sharing of cancer data
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Support the development of AI-based solutions trained on large unbiased, high-quality dataset
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ELIXIR’s cancer portfolio
The new Community augments ELIXIR’s existing activities in cancer data, which include participation in three major EU projects relating to cancer.
EOSC4Cancer is coordinated by ELIXIR Spain, with eight ELIXIR Nodes and the ELIXIR Hub participating. The project facilitates the secure sharing, processing and reuse of diverse types of cancer-related data to support cancer research across Europe. The canSERV project, led by BBMRI-ERIC, provides cancer researchers with access to interdisciplinary oncology services across the European life science research infrastructures, and the ELIXIR Hub is involved as a beneficiary. ELIXIR Spain and ELIXIR Sweden are partners in the EUCAIM project, led by Euro-BioImaging, which is developing a repository for cancer images and an AI-driven research platform for detection, diagnosis and treatment.
The European Genomic Data Infrastructure (GDI) project, coordinated by ELIXIR with ELIXIR Nodes as key delivery partners, is building the technical infrastructure of the 1+ Million Genomes (1+MG) initiative. The project includes a cancer use case which aims to demonstrate the integration of genomic and phenotypic data to improve prevention, prediction and treatment outcomes.
The ELIXIR Cancer Data Community will act as a focal point for experts from ELIXIR Nodes with the ultimate aim of accelerating discoveries in biomedical research and improving outcomes for cancer patients.
About ELIXIR Communities
The ELIXIR Communities Handbook explains Communities, who can join, what the benefits are, and how they’re structured. It also contains links to key documents related to ELIXIR Communities, and describes the responsibilities and benefits of Community membership.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch with the Communities Coordinator, Katharina Heil (katharina.heil [at] elixir-europe.org).
Find out more
- ELIXIR Cancer Data Community webpage – join the Community here
- Roadmap for a European cancer data management and precision medicine infrastructure
- EOSC4Cancer
- canSERV
- EUCAIM
- European Genomic Data Infrastructure (GDI)