ACGT: advancing clinico-genomic trials on cancer - four years of experience

Stud Health Technol Inform. 2011:169:734-8.

Abstract

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.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Biomedical Research
  • Clinical Trials as Topic
  • Computational Biology / organization & administration*
  • Computer Systems
  • Computers
  • Europe
  • Genomics
  • Humans
  • Medical Informatics / organization & administration*
  • Neoplasms / genetics
  • Program Development
  • User-Computer Interface
  • Workflow