Brussels marks the beginning of the European canSERV initiative, which aims to defragment the European cancer research landscape. CanSERV will give academia and business exposure to cross-cutting services and assistance from fundamental science up to clinical application over the next three years to promote individualised treatment for cancer patients.
Within the coming months, the unified platform that will house all of the participating infrastructures’ services will go live. In order to deliver services in a cross-border, coordinated way, canSERV will integrate, coordinate, and align current cancer and related research infrastructures. The critical mass of specialists and cutting-edge services provided by canSERV RIs and their extended networks will be tapped into in this way.
By providing cutting-edge services to cancer researchers, the EU-funded canSERV collaboration will help achieve the objectives of the EU Cancer Mission. Through canSERV’s single, unified international access platform, which will be developed to combine special cancer research services from all consortium partners, funded services can be requested.
For the benefit of people in Europe and beyond, the consortium is dedicated to maintaining long-term, continually providing access to present and future oncology services.
Key Objectives of canSERV
- Over the next three years, to provide at least 200 separate, distinctive Personalized Oncology (PO) relevant and valued cutting programs for life science research in Europe.
- To create a single, uniform, global access platform for making service and training requests.
- To guarantee that any oncology-related data provided complies completely with the FAIR principles, complements other pertinent EU efforts, and works in tandem with them, such as EOSC, UNCAN.eu.
- To continue the network and consolidate resources for the provision of oncology-related services when the project is over.
Overall, canSERV will hasten the conversion of theoretical knowledge into individualised oncology clinical practise, allowing cancer patients to obtain treatments and products more quickly and easily.
Additional project specifics
The EU Cancer Mission is supported by and aligned with canSERV. Interdisciplinary approaches may be the secret to advancing cancer research and identifying novel treatment options, according to the European Commission, which declared this mission last year. By offering novel, interdisciplinary, and personalised oncology services throughout the full cancer continuum, the canSERV initiative directly addresses this. As a result, all EU members and beyond will have access to a wide range of onco-research infrastructure services.
Prof. Jens K. Habermann, Director General of the BBMRI-ERIC in Graz and canSERV Coordinator, says that a more efficient, organised, and defragmented European oncology RI landscape will be produced thanks to the canSERV collaboration, which will also cater to the demands of EU academic and industrial customers.
The provision of top-notch services that are beneficial to all significant stakeholders, including researchers, universities, institutes, prominent SMEs, and European research consortia, is essential to canSERV. The goal is to encourage creative R&D initiatives, speed up the creation of cancer patient solutions across Europe, and make new and specialised research services accessible to the cancer research community.
The interdisciplinary canSERV consortium includes 19 partners from top EU Research Infrastructure Consortia (ERICs), Research Infrastructures (RIs), scientific societies, and patient organisations. Each partner offers canSERV special services and innovations.
CanSERV will offer the broadest and most exhaustive portfolio in cancer research thanks to the transnational cooperation and synergy of the consortium, significantly advancing scientific excellence in Europe and beyond. Open requests for funded services from the global cancer community will be made over the shared platform and extensively publicised in the cancer community.