This proposal for a European Cancer Patient Digital Centre (ECPDC) Information Portal, EU-CIP, addresses the information needs of cancer patients, survivors, relatives, and caregivers. EU-CIP aims to create a patient-centric cancer information portal that improves health literacy, empowers patients, and reduces inequalities in access to cancer care information across Europe. The EU-CIP primary goal is to improve quality of life and enhance cancer patient care by improving access to general and personalized knowledge, delivering comprehensive information on cancer prevention, early detection, diagnosis, and treatment options including risks, side effects and late effects as well as information on rehabilitation and management of recurrence and palliative care. EU-CIP will prioritise high-incidence cancers, those with poor prognosis, and paediatric cancers. A Common Library of Contents available to all Member States will be created and EU-CIP nodes will be deployed in 10 Member States. The Library of Contents will use information from evidence-based sources such as the Knowledge Centre on Cancer and the European Cancer Information Service, existing Cancer Information Portals, and European guidelines. A governance framework for scalable content creation and review processes supported by AI tooling will be established. The consortium partners, including several patient organisations, will ensure that the patients’ view is reflected in the content review and technology usability aspects. The EU-CIP Central and local nodes will be built in a modular fashion to allow integration with existing electronic health infrastructures. To align with the EU Cancer Mission goal to improve lives through prevention, EU-CIP will raise awareness about the Mission and Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan. Alignment with the Mission’s overall plans will be realized through collaboration with the EU funded projects of the related 01-01/01-02 calls.

Patients with cancer often have to make complex decisions about treatment, with the options varying in risk profiles and effects on survival and quality of life. Data-driven decision-support tools (DSTs) have the potential to empower patients, support personalized care, improve health outcomes, and promote health equity (optimal decisions also for underserved groups). However, DSTs currently seldom consider quality of life or individual preferences, and their use in clinical practice remains limited. To address these challenges, the 4D PICTURE consortium will further develop a promising methodology, MetroMapping, to redesign care paths that include novel DSTs. We will better predict treatment outcomes by developing innovative algorithms and incorporating patient experiences, values and preferences, using AI-based models. In co-creation with patients and other stakeholders, we will develop data-driven DSTs for patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer and melanoma. We will evaluate these DSTs as part of MetroMapping as well as stand-alone, to ensure their sustainability as well as addressing social and ethical issues. We will explore the generalizability of MetroMapping and the DSTs to other types of cancer and across other EU member states. Improved care paths integrating comprehensive DSTs will empower patients, their significant others and health care providers in decision making, and strengthen care at the system level by improving resilience and efficiency. Whereas the 4D PICTURE consortium includes leaders in modelling, AI, decision making, citizen science, service design, ethics, risk communication, and policy making, this project will impact clinical practice and science across Europe and beyond.

More than a decade has passed since the first immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) was approved for the treatment of advanced melanoma, marking the beginning of immunotherapies in cancer treatment. However, even in the best scenarios with a combination of ICIs and standard therapies, durable benefit is not achieved in about half of patients. Therefore, new approaches are needed on how best to exploit the potential of ICIs. The scientific aim of the ZAP cancer project is to determine how a local ablative technique, electrochemotherapy with BLM, CDDP or OXA induced immunogenic cell death (ICD), can be combined with gene electrotransfer of pDNA encoding ICIs to elicit a systemic anti-tumor immune response. The ZAP cancer project plans to improve access to scientific excellence, optimize research management and accelerate the exchange of personnel, knowledge and ideas in the European Research Area (ERA) and the two participating institutions from the widening countries; the Institute of Oncology Ljubljana (IOLJ) and the Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) of University of Ljubljana. ZAP cancer will expand the existing collaborative network with three leading European institutions: Institute of Pharmacology and Structural Biology, a department of the CNRS (IPBS-CNRS), Toulouse, France, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL), Leuven, Belgium, The Institute of Translational Pharmacology, Institute of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) and a new partner: The Medical University of Graz (MUG), Graz, Austria. Through the proposed project, a multidisciplinary network of cancer research centers will collaborate to establish a state-of-the-art, high-throughput multi-omics in vitro and in vivo research platform at IOLJ and FHS that will provide them with valuable new expertise and knowledge that will enhance their potential for future successful applications at the European and international levels.

Colorectal, breast and cervical cancer cause 155,000 deaths each year in middle income countries (MIC) in Eastern Europe, while there is good evidence that a large proportion could be prevented by organized screening. Although many MIC in Eastern Europe have implemented some form of cancer screening, this screening is often non-organized, leading to lack of data and quality assurance systems. Also, coverage is commonly low and minority groups are not reached. In a previous HORIZON2020 project ‘EU-TOPIA’, we developed road maps to improve cancer screening programmes in Europe. In the current project, EU-TOPIA-EAST, these roadmaps will be refined and translated into action plans for three MICs: Georgia (breast), Romania (cervix) and Montenegro (colorectal). These action plans will take the local health and social system into account by performing detailed barrier and stakeholder analyses, leading to feasible changes to current screening programs. Next, we will implement these action plans: e.g. in Georgia, we will increase coverage of the programme by establishing a new screening unit; in Romania, we will develop new IT infrastructure to allow invitation-based cervical cancer screening; and finally in Montenegro we will establish a new colonoscopy center to increase programme capacity decrease travel time for participants. The implemented programs will be monitored and evaluated using key indicators and sophisticated decision models to predict the long-term and country-wide benefits, harms and cost-effectiveness. During workshops and roundtable discussions for policymakers and screening program coordinators from all countries in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to build capacity and upscale the implementation of these intervention(s) in Equitable, Accessible, and SusTainable (EU-TOPIA-EAST) ways. In this way, the project will improve the prevention and early diagnosis of cancer in real-life settings in Eastern European and Mediterranean countries.

Cancer affects 35,000 children, adolescents and young adults (CAYAC) in Europe each year. Current 5-year survival rates are 80%, but the intensive oncological treatments leave CAYAC Survivors (CAYACS) at increased risk of cancer or treatment-induced late health effects, excess morbidity and mortality, and reduced quality of life (QoL). Follow-up care of survivors includes monitoring of cancers, managing all types of late effects, and maintaining overall health. It should also involve considering the needs of families whose functioning has been disrupted by cancer. There are several challenges providing follow-up care for CAYACS and their families: i) it is resource-demanding in an overburdened healthcare system, ii) psychosocial and supportive care needs are often unmet, and iii) access is inequal between European countries. The overall goal of e-QuoL is to use e-health tools to promote Equity in Quality of Life for CAYACS and their families. It will adapt an existing interoperable personalised e-Health tool that can be used alone or as an add-on module to existing tools such as digital survivorship care plans already used in several European countries. Through participatory research, involving CAYACS, families, associations, networks, health institutes, social sciences and humanities researchers and industrial partners from 15 different countries and backgrounds, we will i) identify the unmet needs of CAYAC families and survivors’ (including vulnerable groups: young age and cognitive impairments) and ii) adapt accessible and affordable tools to address these needs. These tools will provide a person-centred approach from medical follow-up, preventive behaviours (e.g. physical activity, nutrition), psychological and social support (e.g. education, employment) to related health information (e.g. on reproductive issues). Ultimately, e-QuoL will improve CAYACS’ QoL by enabling them to actively engage in their care and better self-manage their health and well-being. This action is part of the Cancer Mission cluster of projects on “Quality of Life.