- researchers
- Main menu
Clinical Trials: General Information
Life science researchers are increasingly dependent on advanced IT solutions and infrastructures to support them in their daily activities and help access, analyze and interpret the massive amounts of data that are being generated by state of the art research equipment and processes.
It systems and infrastructures are used in all phases of research and development and ACGT aims to provide researchers with access to a variety of tools and services that address most if not all of these phases.
Classical clinical trials are themselves run in different phases. Each phase has specific questions and objectives. The discoveries in molecular-genetic research offer a great opportunity in the development of an individualised more personalised medicine. Nevertheless there is a lack in the seamless integration of data coming from different sources (clinical, molecular genetics, web databases). With the help of computer science these problems can be overcome. Researchers must have an easy and anonymised access to these heterogeneous data.
ACGT brings together internationally recognised leaders in their respective fields, with the aim to deliver to the cancer research community an integrated Clinico-Genomic ICT environment enabled by a powerful GRID infrastructure. In achieving this objective ACGT has formulated a coherent, integrated workplan for the design, development, integration and validation of all technologically challenging areas of work. Namely:
- GRID: delivery of a European Biomedical GRID infrastructure offering seamless mediation services for sharing data and data-processing methods and tools, and advanced security;
- Integration: semantic, ontology based integration of clinical and genomic/proteomic data - taking into account standard clinical and genomic ontologies and metadata;
- Knowledge Discovery: Delivery of data-mining GRID services in order to support and improve complex knowledge discovery processes.
The technological platform is being validated in concrete setting of advanced clinical trials on Cancer.
To support researchers in a variety of settings ACGT promotes the principle of open source and open access, thus enabling the gradual creation of a European Biomedical Grid on Cancer. Hence, the project plans to introduce additional clinical trials during its lifecycle. It is in line with EU priorities and the objectives of the IST program. It targets the fulfilment of urgent needs of the cancer research community, a key area of societal importance and with a view to strengthening the integration of the European Research Area.
ACGT provides a platform that gives researcher the opportunity to have access to a wide range of molecular-genetic data and the possibility for research in molecular-genetic clinical trials. IT also aims to provide researchers with a variety of tools and services that will support them in their daily activities.
The clinical trials run in ACGT will combine the Molecular-genetic research with a clinical trial database to bridge the gap between the different facilities and provide new discovery tools for researchers.
Further information and links on Clinical trials and Bioethics can be found in the links page.