ACGT: advancing clinico-genomic trials on cancer - four years of experience.
Martin L., Anguita A., Graf N., Tsiknakis M., Brochhausen M., Rüping S., Bucur A., Sfakianakis S., Sengstag T., Buffa F., Stenzhorn H.
The challenges regarding seamless integration of distributed, heterogeneous and multilevel data arising in the context of contemporary, post-genomic clinical trials cannot be effectively addressed with current methodologies. An urgent need exists to access data in a uniform manner, to share information among different clinical and research centers, and to store data in secure repositories assuring the privacy of patients. Advancing Clinico-Genomic Trials (ACGT) was a European Commission funded Integrated Project that aimed at providing tools and methods to enhance the efficiency of clinical trials in the -omics era. The project, now completed after four years of work, involved the development of both a set of methodological approaches as well as tools and services and its testing in the context of real-world clinico-genomic scenarios. This paper describes the main experiences using the ACGT platform and its tools within one such scenario and highlights the very promising results obtained.