Projects

The German Consortium for Translational Cancer Research (DKTK) is one of six German Centres for Health Research (DZG) funded by the BMBF. The cross-location networking of the consortium is made possible by the IT of the Clinical Communication Platform (CCP-IT), which is developed in a separate working group consisting of at least one member per partner location. Data from tumour documentation and biomaterial banks can be contributed while preserving data protection and sovereignty for the consortium, thanks to the federated network architecture also from patients before the DKTK was founded. Thus, feasibility studies and recruitment of studies are supported not only during, but also before their application to the DKTK.

website:  Clinical Communication Platform

The DKFZ-Hector Cancer Institute at the University Medical Center Mannheim (UMM) aims to establish a model institution for Germany with international appeal by bundling competencies in the field of cancer research and cancer medicine, accelerating the transfer of results from cutting-edge oncological research into patient care (translation) and making findings from everyday clinical practice usable for cancer research (reverse translation) A concept for the transfer of routine data from patients at the UMM was developed in coordination with the UMM's Data Integration Center in order to transfer routine clinical data on study patients in an automated manner. A graphical user interface triggers the generation of patient pseudonyms at the DKFZ and enables their disclosure to a trusted third party (TTP) in the UMM hospital network (hospital TTP). This "link" between the DKFZ and the UMM serves as the basis and proof of the legal basis for a subsequent transfer of medical patient data.

website: DKFZ -Hector Cancer Institute at the University Medical Centre Mannheim

The Helmholtz Institute for Translational Oncology Mainz (HI-TRON Mainz) is to be established as a world-leading center for personalized cancer medicine with a focus on immunotherapy at the science location Mainz.
As the central point of the institution and to support sustainable data management, the HI-TRON Mainz Data Portal is being developed, a data catalog filled with metadata that will provide scientists with an overview of potentially available data and biospecimens.
The portal enables scientists to search for, for example, expression profiles or molecular signatures in other study and tumor entities. It also enables cross-OMIC integrations to develop multidimensional classifiers using machine learning.

The HiGHmed consortium is working on novel, interoperable solutions in medical informatics with the aim of making medical patient data accessible for clinical research and teaching.The project bundles and integrates the competencies of 12 leading university hospitals in Germany as well as other partners from science and industry. The oncology use case addresses the challenge of integrating enormous amounts of data from genome sequencing and radiology into clinical practice. A virtual oncology center will illustrate the treatment course of cancer patients and serve as an exchange platform for clinics, research institutions, physicians and patients. In this way, similar cancer cases will be better identified and individual patient-oriented treatment will be made possible.

The Pan-European Biobank and Biomolecular Research Infrastructure (BBMRI-ERIC) is a distributed biomedical and life science structure for the sustainable storage and dissemination of biobank samples and related data in Europe. The BBMRI-ERIC provides access to partner biobank and biomolecular resources and their expertise and services.

As part of the German Biobanking Alliance, a distributed team of 20 computer scientists is creating an IT platform for the exchange of biosamples so that large multicentre sample collections can be compiled for research projects. Here, the biobanks are connected both within the German consortium and with international biobank infrastructures such as BBMRI-ERIC.

The goal of this project is to establish a sustainable solution for the systematic prioritization of new cancer therapies for children in Europe and worldwide through better use of existing molecular and clinical data, thus offering a new chance to children with previously incurable cancers. Metadata harmonization and data linkage are essential for this. The Hopp-ITCC International Data Integration Platform will contribute to prioritizing anticancer drug development for children and adolescents with cancer in the new regulatory environment.

Technical teams together with clinicians across the consortium will define a common data model (CDM) at two levels: Firstly, a smaller set of common data elements (CDE) shared by most or even all data sources serves the purpose of finding, visualizing and requesting data across all connected partner sites. Secondly, for data integration addressing specific research questions, this dataset will be complemented by projectspecific larger datasets. For this second step, common trajectories of scientific questions will be defined among the main fields of biological fundamental discoveries, clinic-biological translational research and clinical trials.

Using colorectal cancer as an example, the onkoFDZ project aims to combine data from seven cancer registries with other healthcare-related medical data, such as concomitant diseases, therapies or links to study data. Subsequently, AI methods such as machine learning will be used to record the use and efficacy of various treatments and to make the results of the analyses performed usable for guideline groups, treatment providers and the public.

In the future, all patients in Germany with advanced lung cancer will be able to obtain access to molecular diagnostics and innovative therapies, via a national network. To implement this, 15 university cancer centers will combine forces in the national Network for Genomic Medicine (nNGM) – including all centers of the German Consortium for Translational Cancer Research (DKTK) and all oncological centers of excellence currently funded by the DKH. The basis for all distributed processes is a secure networking of the bridgeheads of the Clinical Communication Platform (CCP-IT). Thanks to its extension via the initiative Connecting Comprehensive Cancer Centers (C⁴), this platform includes all of the nNGM centres as well.

The "Guidelines for data protection in medical research projects - Generic Solutions from the TMF 2.0" provides complete and consistent guidelines for creating medical research federations, with an emphasis on data protection.

Freely-available implementations already exist for some of the central IT components proposed in the guidelines. These do not, however, cover all of the functions described in the document. The goal of the MAGIC-Federation is to develop the most important components that do not yet exist in the realms of identity management, permission management and consent management. This will be done based on already-existing software, and the results will be made available to the scientific community.