GSS EU Science Funding Gateway

The successful proposal should:

• Develop the UNCAN.eu platform by integrating and, where relevant, complementing existing or planned data nodes of European research infrastructures and/or other national infrastructures that may link various cancer data holders across Member States and Associated Countries (e.g. hospitals, research centres, comprehensive cancer centres, etc.). The number of Member States involved should be sufficient to demonstrate scalability and flexibility of the UNCAN.eu platform while allowing for stepwise onboarding of more countries.
• Provide tools, services and workflows to researchers across data nodes for dataset creation, standardisation, data discovery, secure access, management, visualization, harmonization, analysis and other functions as appropriate. This task should capitalise on EOSC4cancer’s achievements, integrating and expanding as appropriate the available tools and solutions. It should also take advantage of the European Health Data Space and the European Open Science Cloud frameworks.
• Design and implement a rich and diverse portfolio of use-cases to inform, steer the development and demonstrate the validity of the UNCAN.eu platform. Use cases should focus on research questions that are in line with the Cancer Mission objectives and that may advance the understanding of mechanisms involved in cancer development and progression beyond the current state of the art. At least one use-case should target a cancer type with a 5-year overall survival of less than 50% from the time of diagnosis. A second use-case should target paediatric cancer.
• At the same time, use-cases should be functional to the design and implementation of UNCAN.eu to increase the diversity of digital tools and services available for cancer researchers. The mobilisation and integration of a large amount of research and real word data beyond current practice and a balanced participation of clinicians, disease experts and data scientists will be essential to achieve the objectives of this topic. Due attention should be paid to sex and gender, disaggregating the data as appropriate.
• The successful consortium should develop innovative approaches, to integrate and analyse heterogeneous data from multiple sources and different research domains, including the participation of the necessary interdisciplinary set of European infrastructures and national data nodes. In this regard, at least one use-case should integrate imaging, digital pathology and genomic data, using and/or contributing with new data sources to the Genomics Data Infrastructure (GDI) and Cancer Image Europe (EUCAIM).
• Give emphasis to data being managed and shared in line with the FAIR principles, and the concept of FAIR-by-design is applied wherever possible. The applicants must demonstrate that the necessary data sources are, or will be, effectively and timely available. During the project lifetime, new data sources that might become available at a later stage can be accommodated as well as allowing additional data holders to join the UNCAN.eu platform. Results must be open source and made available through a public repository under a permissive license. Open access data should be provided whenever possible.