• Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project
o What is the problem/issue being addressed?
o The University Medical Center Schleswig-Holstein (UKSH) in Germany and the medical technology company iCellate Medical AB in Sweden together inventory the opportunities for better diagnostics for breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and pancreatic cancer. Those three major cancers have devastating effects on patients and society and therefore represent an urgent need for better diagnostics and treatments. iCellate Medical’s new CellMate® bloodbased cancer test samples the cells and mutations of invasive cancers to provide the data to classify the cancer into biologically meaningful groups for better therapy decision support. The multinational company QIAGEN, provider of sample and assay technologies for molecular diagnostics, together with iCellate Medical, develops the new Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to classify cancers based on the data on genomic mutations. The UKSH provides access to patient samples and clinical data to test the clinical potential and best applications in breast cancer, ovarian cancer and pancreatic cancer to in the best way benefit patients.
o Patients respond individually to cancers and to treatments. It is therefore important that each individual patient receives the treatment that is best suited to treat the patient's individual biological variant of the disease.
o In this project we sample individual invasive cancer cells that have made their way to the blood and therefore are easy to sample.
o These cells may be the most aggressive cancer cells there are, since they are on their way to seed new metastases, and may therefore be the most appropriate cancer samples to test.
o Why is it important for society?
o Cancer needs to become a manageable disease.
o To manage cancer effectively physicians and patients need access to the fundamental biological information of the patient's own specific variant of cancer, in addition to the clinical information on signs, symptoms and other findings.
o Only then can the root causes of the cancer disease be managed effectively.
o The results should be a longer life with better quality for the patient and cost savings for the healthcare system and for society.
o What are the overall objectives?
• To increase the throughput of the CellMate® laboratory test for cancer so it meets the initial clinical need.
• To optimize the AI-driven clinical decision support functionality of CellMate® to predict the origin of the cancer and suggest the optimal treatment.
• To conduct preliminary clinical testing in breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and pancreatic cancer to find the most promising initial uses of CellMate®.
• To ensure initial product uptake in healthcare organizations by way of scientific publications, after vetting for that the results are mature for dissemination and have been vetted for protecting its intellectual property rights, patents etc..
