Life in ACGT
‘Workshop on European-Japanese Research Collaboration in Medical ICT’ held at Hokkaido University, Japan (Aran Lunzer and Yuzuru Tanaka- Hokkaido University)
In September 2009 ACGT partner Hokkaido University hosted a two-day workshop that brought ACGT’s technical, medical and legal representatives together with planners from the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), and the leaders of academic and industrial research teams. As well as disseminating the EU's clinical-trial infrastructure strategy, as embodied in ACGT, the workshop provided a forum for discussing increased cooperation between Japan and the EU on future medical ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) projects.
It is still rare for a European Commission-funded project to include a Japanese research partner. Although participation from outside Europe has been allowed since the Fourth Framework Programme (FP4), under FP6 there was a Japanese partner in only ten projects under the Information Society Technologies theme, of which just seven (including ACGT) are Integrated Projects. One barrier to participation is that partners in Japan cannot receive any EC funding; Hokkaido University has funded its work in ACGT using separately obtained competitive research grants from the Japanese government.
Hokkaido University, based in Sapporo, is one of Japan’s seven former “imperial universities”, which also include Kyoto University and the University of Tokyo. When the proposal for ACGT was put together in 2005, Professor Yuzuru Tanaka’s Meme Media Laboratory had been collaborating with the technical leaders, FORTH, for over ten years, including numerous researcher exchanges. In 2004, Tanaka had helped set up a new graduate school whose mix of computer science and bioinformatics expertise gave it a clear fit with ACGT’s mission.
The Hokkaido University team’s main contribution to ACGT has been in applying our research on knowledge-media architecture and interface design to two of the project’s software tools: (1) the graphical Trial Outline Builder (TOB) for ObTiMA, ACGT's ontology-based clinical-trial management tool, is built using the new ‘Webble World’ meme-media environment; (2) the OncoRecipeSheet, an interface supporting multi-site generation and comparison of results from the ‘OncoSimulator’ cancer-simulation system, is based on so-called subjunctive-interface techniques.
Having a partner in Japan also offered ACGT an opportunity for focussed dissemination beyond Europe, and holding a dissemination event here in the project’s last year allowed for a full presentation including concrete details of the expected final results. Nine ACGT members visited for the September workshop, including Manolis Tsiknakis and Norbert Graf (the project’s technical and medical leaders, respectively), and five other work-package leaders. The Japan-side participants included three senior strategy planners from JST, along with representatives from the University of Tokyo, the National Institute of Informatics, IBM Research, and pharmaceutical and clinical research organisations.
The meeting was held fully in English, without interpreters. On the first day the ACGT team, including the Hokkaido University members, presented and explained the project. Issues raised by the audience during these presentations were explored further in free-discussion sessions on the second day. Discussion ranged widely over technological and legal issues facing multi-site clinical trials in Japan, the EU, and elsewhere. One notable point is that in Japan, where clinical trials deal mainly with the testing of drugs, assigning a patient randomly to one of several candidate treatments is not allowed. Such differences have led to JST becoming very interested in ACGT and its approach, and keen to build on the EU/Japan connection. The discussions also revealed a number of basic legislative and practical barriers to inter-regional cooperation, that will require concerted effort from all sides to overcome; we hope that the connections made at this meeting will create a new impetus for doing so.
After the workshop the ACGT visitors remained in Sapporo for project-internal technical and managerial discussions, along with further opportunities to sample the local culture and cuisine. We would be happy if they remember these latter aspects, too, when looking for non-European partners for follow-on projects to ACGT.