Cancer- healthcare, research and innovation face core common challenges, such as fragmentation of initiatives and distancing from important stakeholders, requiring coordinated solutions. These challenges are recognized in Horizon Europe’s Cancer Mission Implementation Plan and in Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan. The proposal Establishing of Cancer Mission Hubs: Networks and Synergies (ECHoS) represents a unique opportunity to coordinate R&I and Healthcare actions on cancer with policy-making processes creating transnational communication & collaboration networks aligned with Cancer Mission objectives. Experiences shows that the setup and implementation of innovative health solutions are more likely to be successful when a broad range of stakeholders and decision-makers from the public and private sectors are part of the process. By fostering the creation of National Cancer Mission Hubs (NCMHs) in member states and associated countries ECHoS will create the conditions for organized stakeholders and individual citizens to collaborate and engage in policy dialogues. The implementation of the Cancer Mission objectives will promote more resilient and people-centric healthcare and research systems. ECHoS will produce (i) general models and guidelines for the creation of sustainable NCMHs, (ii) a knowledge exchange programme to support development of NCMHs competences, (iii) impact models and training sets to help efficiently engaging with distinct stakeholders, (iv) a toolkit for synergies to help NCMH engaging in collaborative work with individual European Initiatives, (v) a business continuity model envisaging long-term sustainability of a EU network of NCMHs and (vi) a calendar of events to create awareness on NCMHs and to help closing the gap in citizens’ participation in cancer policy. In summary, ECHoS will create conditions for NCMHs to be Mission Cancer advocates in MS/AC and set the pace for the development of a transnational network of NCMHs in a second phase.

We propose an ambitious yet well-conceived and deliverable pan-European, pan-cancer, pan-disciplinary, and multi-omic approach to address the pressing unmet need for an accurate, non-invasive, acceptable and cost-effective method of detecting precancerous and early-stage cancers in those individuals with Lynch syndrome (LS), the most common monogenetic increased hereditary cancer risk. LS has historically been underfunded and underserved, leading to significant an inequality in access and treatment. As a result, LS carriers have suffered needless cancers and deaths as a result. Our consortium has brought together the leading European experts, biotechnology companies and patient advocates to guarantee deliver practice-changing results that can be rapidly upscaled and adopted across the European Union and globally. Using an innovative clinical trial design, we will evaluate several multiple promising, non-invasive, liquid biopsy-based technologies in the three most common LS cancer types for an early-stage cancers detection. By leveraging Artificial intelligence (AI), we will identify traces of cancer, ensuring applicability to diverse healthcare systems. A comprehensive framework will assess the broader socio-economic and ethical impacts, ensuring that the solutions align with the societal values and healthcare needs. Parterning with leading biomarker companies (GNT, MSInsight, MSICare, MSIPlus and Elypta), we aim to deliver a multi-omic solution for affordable, accessible and effective test to advance the detection of heritable cancer detections in LS. This action is part of the Cancer Mission cluster of projects on “Prevention & early detection (early detection heritable cancers).

It is the aim of PERMIDES to strenghten the competitiveness and foster the innovation potential of Personalized Medicine as an Emerging Industry in Europe by providing key solutions for the reconfiguration of the biopharmaceutical value chain towards a Health Economy 4.0 with a special focus on oncology (i.e. cancer treatment). Current value chain challenges lie in e.g. data gathering and exchange, big data and machine learning, or new software-based marketing methods based. Via a cross-clustering approach, leading biopharma and IT clusters from three countries (Austria, Germany and Norway) will create novel cross-sectoral collaborations between SMEs to address innovation barriers in the biopharma sector via cutting-edge IT solutions. As a cross-cutting industry, the ICT and software sector is an enabler of innovation in many industries and therefore provides a broad knowledge base of processes and best practice solutions in diverse industrial contexts and business environments. PERMIDES will create an collaboration space consisting of workshops, a semantic online matchmaking portal complemented by matchmaking events that will allow biopharma enterprises to identify the most suitable ICT company from the participating clusters. In a second step, the biopharmaceutical SME and the ICT partner will jointly tackle an innovation barrier in the value chain using an innovation voucher scheme. Follow-up coaching and transfer activites by the cluster organisations will maximise the effect of around 90 collaborative projects that PERMIDES aims to achieve.

DIGI-B-CUBE project aims to unlock the cross-sectoral collaborative potential of SMEs by combining Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cognitive Computing Digital Technologies (CCDT) with the Bioimaging-Biosensing-Biobanking (B-CUBE) and realted industries to deliver market sensitive disruptive technologies and generating innovative solutions that enhance patient-centred diagnostic work-flows, delivered through the improved algorithms for Medical Diagnostics’ efficiency and accuracy. DIGI-B-CUBE will study the characteristics in market dynamics & specificities for innovations created by merging AI, CCDT & B-CUBE and realted industries. By providing a framework for a more structured cross-sectoral and cross-border collaboration, that manages all the complex work-flows within the process, DIGI-B-CUBE instantiates the mechanisms to ensure the long-term sustainability of the action through collaborations of the participating clusters with hospitals, academia, industry, investors, business angels, managing authorities of the national innovation agencies and the European Commission support measures (such as EIT, ESIF). The main objective of this project is to provide key digital solutions for the reconfiguration of the Medical Diagnostics and related value chains towards a Health Economy 4.0 with a special focus on Biobanking, Bioimaging and Biosensing and realted industries. Activities financed by the ESIF in the participating regions as part of the Smart Specialisation Strategies will be bundled in cooperation with the responsible managing authorities in addition to the innovation voucher scheme for SMEs. By integrating innovations in IT into Bioimaging, Biosensing and Biobanking and realted industries, this project will accelerate the goal of personalised medicine that can eventually offer patients with fast and efficient diagnosis-treatment-healthcare system.