The COMPASS project (Cardio-Oncology Multidisciplinary Patient ASsistance Solution) has been launched to develop innovative solutions that strengthen cardio-oncology services. The five-year initiative is funded by the European Union under the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) and brings together more than 60 partners from 25 countries including hospitals, research centres, universities, MedTech companies, SMEs, and patient organisations.
The COMPASS network will run numerous clinical trials and research projects focused on imaging, biomarkers and long-term patient follow-up. These efforts are designed to enable earlier detection of cardiotoxicity, support safer cancer treatment, and improve long-term cardiovascular outcomes for cancer patients.
Improving the heart health of people living with and beyond cancer has become a key priority. One in four anticancer medicinal products have required a safety warning related with cardiac or vascular side effects, creating new challenges for patients and healthcare systems as cancer survival rates continue to rise.
By combining scientific excellence with real-world clinical experience and industry knowledge, the COMPASS project is designed to turn research advances into practical improvements in cancer care.
Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) NHS Foundation Trust is one of the project partners and will receive €399,000 in funding. Daniel McGowan, Associate Professor in the Department of Oncology, University of Oxford, and Head of Education and Research in the Department of Medical Physics and Clinical Engineering at OUH, will lead the Oxford team in collaboration with GE HealthCare. Their research is focus on how they can adapt routine PET scans to also assess a patient’s heart health.
“The aim is that when a person has a PET scan to check on their cancer, we could effectively give them a free heart check at the same time,” said Dr McGowan. “With this additional information, we can stratify patients into those who need to see a cardiologist fairly urgently, those who we’d like to monitor and those whose hearts are healthy.”
This approach could allow clinicians to extract more information from a single scan, offering a cost-effective and efficient way to enhance both routine care and clinical trials.
“Many patients have other scans or echocardiograms to check on their heart. This new approach would mean those additional tests – with the time and stress they might entail for the patient – may no longer be necessary, as the single PET scan could answer two questions at once.”
Zoe Wilson, a Research Scientist at OUH and DPhil student in the Department of Oncology is also part of the COMPASS project, investigating how PET scan data can be repurposed to assess heart health. As part of this project, she will use data from hospitals in Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal. This expanded dataset opens up opportunities to use AI and machine learning to analyse the scan and improve the early identification of patients at risk of heart problems.
“This dedicated funding will enable us to expand and accelerate our efforts in this field, which should speed up the translation of our research work into clinical care, and ultimately get the benefit to patients quicker.”
Through the development of novel technologies and care pathways, COMPASS will provide patients and healthcare professionals with better tools to understand, detect early and manage heart problems caused by cancer treatments. To ensure lasting impact, COMPASS will assess the sustainability and long-term adoption of its solutions, helping ensure that successful innovations can be integrated into healthcare systems and used beyond the lifetime of the project.
Find out more about COMPASS: https://compass-care.eu/