In this Issue

	Editorial
	Clinical Trials
	Grid News
	Products and Services
	Feature Article
	Community view
	Legal and Ethical issues
	Events
	Life in ACGT
	ACGT people

Some Other Links

ACGT web site

Editorial

Welcome to this first edition of the ACGT Newsletter!

ACGT is an EC co-funded project of the 6th Framework Program focusing on the development of open-source computer grid-based infrastructure and services that will support clinico-genomic trials in the area of cancer research.
We are just about completing our 2^nd year of existence and getting at a point where many of the ideas of the project are taking shape and being implemented in actual systems. At the same time a lot of interesting developments are taking place in the wider areas of clinical trials, IT infrastructures and semantic technologies to merit a newsletter that is dedicated to keeping practitioners in these fields up to date and in touch with each other.
We have designed this newsletter with the broader community in mind, not just the members of the ACGT consortium, and so we cover work that takes place within the project itself as well as developments that are broadly relevant to computer grid research, clinical trials, semantic technologies, IT services for life science research and eHealth in general. The newsletter will always host a feature article and for this first edition we have chosen to introduce ACGT itself in a bit more detail. We will also be hosting the views of prominent members of the community on interesting and important issues and for this edition Prof. Gordon McVee discusses...
Our Clinical Trials and Grid News sections will be covering developments in both of these fields while the Products and Services section will be updating you on software or other tools that are available to the community for use.
We hope that you will find this newsletter interesting and look forward to welcoming you as a member of the growing ACGT community!

Clinical Trials

Clinical Cancer trials are ongoing for almost every type of cancer. Most of these trials are solely based on clinical data which to a certain degree reduces our ability to better understand how this disease operates. In contrast ACGT focuses on the integration of multilevel biomedical data significantly increasing clinicians' ability to better understand cancer and thus help with the design of better therapies for higher cure rates.

ACGT clinico-genomic trials are devoted to archiving and analysing individual patient data on associations to molecular genetic findings with the ultimate objective of developing more individualized treatments for cancer patients. At the moment two clinical trials use the ACGT platform: the TOP trial for breast cancer and the SIOP 2001/GPOH trial for nephroblastoma, the most common childhood kidney cancer.
The SIOP 2001/GPOH trial is a multicentre prospective randomized trial to evaluate the necessity of anthracyclines (doxorubicin, a cytostatic drug with the potential risk of heart disease (cardiomyopathy) as a late effect)

Grid news

After almost 2 years of background research and the specification of user requirements, ACGT has completed the architecture design of its Grid infrastructure. Put simply, a grid infrastructure is a collection of servers and communication protocols that allow highly complex and compute-intensive tasks to be shared by the computers in the grid in a safe and efficient manner.

Products and Services

When clinicians, bio-researchers or any other users think of IT supporting systems and tools, they think in terms of their daily tasks and routines and how such tools can help them perform these tasks more easily and more effectively.
ACGT is an infrastructure project but of course like any infrastructure its success will be judged on the basis of how much it is used by its target users and, in this case, by how many resources are available through it. ACGT is presently focusing on the significant amount of work needed to put this infrastructure in place but at te same time it is also looking to make available a number of services and other resources that will help end users perform their daily activities. These resources will span a broad area of interests including cancer tumor growth simulations, clinical trial design and management, literature research, statistical analysis tools and many more.

Feature article

The Vision and Objectives of ACGT

Advances in post genomic research have created significant opportunities for offering personalized treatment and better health care services to the population at large. At the same time clinical trials have become a bottleneck in terms of complexity, effectiveness and, in their present form, fitness for purpose. In the realm of information technologies on the other hand advances in semantic technologies and grid computing have reached a stage where multi-dimensional applications requiring the combination of heterogeneous data and software resources can be realistically tackled.
ACGT (Advancing Clinico-Genomic Trials on cancer: Open Grid Services for improving Medical Knowledge Discovery) is an Integrated Project (IP) funded in the 6th Framework Program of the European Commission under the Action Line "Integrated biomedical information for better health".

Commmunity view

Clinical Cancer trials are ongoing for almost every type of cancer. Most of these trials are solely based on clinical data which to a certain degree reduces our ability to better understand how this disease operates. In contrast ACGT focuses on the integration of multilevel biomedical data significantly increasing clinicians' ability to better understand cancer and thus help with the design of better therapies for higher cure rates.

ACGT clinico-genomic trials are devoted to archiving and analysing individual patient data on associations to molecular genetic findings with the ultimate objective of developing more individualized treatments for cancer patients. At the moment two clinical trials use the ACGT platform: the TOP trial for breast cancer and the SIOP 2001/GPOH trial for nephroblastoma, the most common childhood kidney cancer.
The SIOP 2001/GPOH trial is a multicentre prospective randomized trial to evaluate the necessity of anthracyclines (doxorubicin, a cytostatic drug with the potential risk of heart disease (cardiomyopathy) as a late effect)

Legal and Ethical aspect

Data Protection

The latest thinking on legal, ethical and data security issues surrounding clinical trials
Genetics present a tremendous variety of possibilities for medical care offering a lot of hope for better patient-care. As vast amounts of all kinds of data need to be processed when genetic research is done and as the trials are so complex to build up it is in principle a good idea to share data and computer power in order to achieve common goals faster. But this is unfortunately only half the story.
The other half of the story is that genetic data are of an extremely sensitive nature. They can have impact on the patient's life and give important information not only about the person himself but also about relatives, who might not even be born yet! Needless to say that every employer, every insurance company and every state prosecutor would be happy to have access to such data...

Events

ACGT is following an active dissemination strategy in reaching its various end-users and stakeholders. For the immediate future ACGT has planned 2 events:

1) ACGT will participate in the e-Science 2007, the 3rd IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing. ACGT will be presenting a paper entitled "GridR: An R-based grid-enabled tool for data analysis in ACGT clinicogenomics trials". In this paper, an approach devoped by ACGT for making the R system available in a large-scale Grid environment is described.

2) ACGT will organize a special Session on "Knowledge Discovery and Decision Support Systems in Health Information Systems", in collaboration with the EU FP6 funded projects HEARTFAID and MyHEART. The session will take place during the HEALTHINF 2008 conference (http://www.healthinf.org/Special_Sessions.htm), 28-31 January 2008, Madeira, Portugal.

Life in ACGT

Earlier this year, ACGT presented a poster at the ECCO 14 Meeting (14th European Cancer Conference) in Barcelona held from 23rd to 27th of September.
The title of the Poster was "Clinical requirements of "In Silico Oncology" as part of the integrated project ACGT" authored by: Norbert Graf, Christine Desmedt, Alexander Hoppe, Manolis Tsiknakis, Dimitra Dionysiou and Georgios Stamatakos.

People in ACGT

Dr. Manolis Tsiknakis - FORTH

Dr. Tsiknakis is the Scientific Director of ACGT and Principal Investigator and Leader of the Center for eHealth Technologies at the Biomedical Informatics Laboratory of the Institute of Computer Science at FORTH. His research interests include Intelligent Health Information Integration, Medical Informatics and eHealth, Distributed Architectures for Health Information Networks, HealthGRIDs, Component-based Software Engineering, and Socio-economic aspects of Health Telematics and eHealth services.

Prof. Dr. Norbert Graf - University of the Saarland

Prof. Graf is the medical director of the Department for Pediatric Hematology and Oncology at the University Hospital of the Saarland and Chairman of the SIOP 2001/ GPOH Trial on Nephroblastoma. He is Dean for study affairs at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of the Saarland and member of several national and international societies. His research interests include Pediatric Oncology, especially nephroblastoma and brain tumors, Clinical Trials, Ethical issues in medicine, eHealth, eLearning and Medical Education. He is the leader of Work package 2 "Users needs and requirements" and Quality Manager in ACGT.