Can you give some background on the EurocanPlatform?

EurocanPlatform is a really very exciting project. It’s very innovative and I think ambitious but I think it’s going to be a productive project from the European Union. It’s derived from a study which was done on the weaknesses of European cancer research and also the weaknesses in converting that research into delivery of better care for European cancer patients. It was identified that there were some really, really strong, very competitive, internationally competitive, cancer institutes in Europe but not one of them was big enough to tackle all the issues emerging out of the technologies of the molecular genetic explosion.

So in order to make European cancer research more competitive, competitive, say, with Asia or with America, it was deemed necessary to put these top institutes together and to see if they could collaborate with one another rather than compete. And that’s what’s happened. We’re now a couple of years into this project and it’s extremely effective. We’ve got essentially twenty odd of the top blue-chip cancer institutes in Europe, let’s say the two football teams the best in Europe, we’ve got 22 players that’s the sort of level we’re at, Real Madrid, Bayern. What they’re doing is combining their talents and their resources and their human resources and their omics resources etc. The drive was to improve, as it all should be for cancer research, care for patients. It’s very heterogeneous in outcomes across Europe, a lot of controversy about why you get better treatment in one country versus another. What’s general to all of these is that the pace of getting this exciting new research which is developing all over the world to the benefit of patients, that’s far too slow.

Now one of the things that ecancer is doing in this project is disseminating all that is happening within the project to all the partners and telling the institutions what’s going on. But it’s also about linking up with the ECPC, European Cancer Patients Coalition, and ECCO to get messages out to patient advocacy groups, patient support groups, patient research groups and involving them in the decisions about the directions in which the research should be going. Ecancer has worked since the beginning of the EurocanPlatform project, they built a website for it, we’ve done an inventory of all the research partners, all the institutes. On the website you’ll find what every institute is doing, which platforms they have and which platforms they’re sharing. You can find every publication that has come from the institute and that’s a download directly onto PubMed. So the institutes don’t need to share their annual reports with each other any longer, once a year or once a two years, they can go straight into the ecancer EurocanPlatform site and find out exactly who has published what, either as a separate institute or together with partners in the EurocanPlatform.

The essence of the EurocanPlatform project is translation. This is a buzzword from the last decade or so but translation means essentially translating the laboratory discoveries into patient benefit. There are some really very good examples already where we’ve found medicines which are specific to subgroups of patients who have got specific abnormalities at the level of their genes. So they have a genetic mistake and that’s what’s driving their cancer forward and making it explode. We can find medicines to lock that mutation away and to help specific cancer patients with this kind of mutation. That’s all in theory very attractive and very exciting but with these new drugs come costs and also the tests for the gene mutations are costly. So whereas we’re not any longer treating all breast cancer patients with the same medicine, causing a lot of costs, but are we just as expensive subsetting patients out by their genes and their genetic mutations and their epigenes and then using very expensive drugs just to treat those groups.

So in partnership with the European Association of Cancer Research, EurocanPlatform and ecancer put on a satellite symposium, not supported by pharma, not supported by anybody except the partners. We looked at translational science in cancer and asked the question, OK, how is it going? And then the second question, can we afford the outcome? We had four superb speakers from the partner institutes who talked about brain cancer and breast cancer and how to handle thorny issues, at least some people think they’re thorny issues, patients don’t but ethical committees do like biobanks and privacy and so on. It’s remarkable how patients don’t actually get too concerned about these issues. The bottom line was that, yes, this is cost economic to pursue this strategy of translational medicine, finding groups of patients who are not called breast cancer but are called one of ten different kinds of breast cancer and are treated in different ways. This is personalising, if you like, the approach to patients with particular kinds of types, subtypes, genetic subtypes of breast cancer, of lung cancer or whatever, and then choosing the appropriate drugs to manage that patient. That’s very personal and it’s really very new and this conference from EurocanPlatform showed that there was reasonable optimism about this being affordable for governments and for insurance companies throughout Europe.

Will the final summary of the project be made available?

90% of what’s going on in this important project is already in the public domain. As soon as it’s reviewed and it’s trustworthy then ecancer gets that out to the general public and so on. The people who pay their taxes to the European Parliament can see what they’re getting for their money. At the end of the project there’s a very important question about whether the European Commission will wish to set this up as a standing arrangement. I very much hope they do, I think that the evidence so far is very strongly in favour of this being a real entity and this will be a competitive entity which will be entrusted by other funders of research to take new ideas, new technologies and fast-track them through the translational process to the patient’s bedside. I’m hoping and planning for the continuation of this approach by the European Commission. It depends on whether at the end of the day we’re found to have done the right amount of work and made an amount of progress for the money that has gone into the project but I’m confident that at the halfway mark we’re certainly ahead of schedule and delivering ahead of expectation.