canSERV

Funding programme: Horizon Europe (N 101058620)

Budget: €14.8M

Coordinator: BBMRI-ERIC

Duration: 3 years (Sept 2022 - Aug 2025, extended to Aug 2026)

The canSERV project aims to defragment the landscape of European cancer research and will enable academia and industry access to cross-cutting services and support from basic science up to clinical translation to foster personalised medicine for cancer patients. The project will contribute to the EU Cancer Mission through the provision of innovative services.

All services of the participating infrastructures will be bundled on a common platform. canSERV will connect, coordinate, and align existing oncology and complementary Research Infrastructures (RIs) together providing unified, transnational services. The canSERV project will work to ensure that oncology-related data provided will be fully compliant with the FAIR principles, and complement other relevant EU initiatives.

ECRIN's role in canSERV

ECRIN will be working with other partners to provide clinical investigators in the cancer community with support in the planning and design of complex clinical trials (platform trials, basket trials, umbrella trials, multidisciplinary trials). ECRIN will also develop a secure and GDPR-compliant cancer clinical trial patient-level data sharing repository, based on the model developed in the EOSC-Life project for COVID-19. The tool will focus on linking cancer related data across Europe.

More specifically as part of the canSERV consortium ECRIN offers two valuable services to researchers.
1. Support for planning and design of complex clinical trials:
A service dedicated to assisting researchers in all stages of developing their clinical trials research proposals, from idea generation to finalizing research protocol. This includes:

• A Clinical Trial Help Desk, to address all planning-related queries from researchers.
• Expert advice covering trial methodology, study feasibility, risk assessment.
• Regulatory, ethical and insurance requirements.
• Planning, collection, and use of (control) data.
• Data management plans.
• Funding mechanisms available and preparation of necessary trial budget.
• Task distribution for multinational study management.
• Open access tools (www.ecrin.org/tools)

2. Clinical trial data deposition service:
ECRIN will offer support services to researchers willing to deposit their clinical research data into a secure repository. Our platform is designed to ensure the safe sharing of sensitive data, fully compliant with GDPR standards, within a trusted environment.