The aim of INTERVENE is to develop and test next generation tools for disease prevention, diagnosis, and personalised treatment utilizing the first US-European pool of genomic and health data and integrating longitudinal and disease-relevant -omics data into genetic risk scores. Resulting in unprecedented potential for prediction, diagnosis, and personalised treatments for complex and rare diseases. Some of the largest biobanks in Europe and one in the USA will be securely linked and harmonized in a GDPR-compliant repository with data from more than 1.7 million genomes. INTERVENE will demonstrate the potential and benefits of powerful AI technologies on the next generation of integrative genetic scores (IGS). The clinical and economic benefits of IGS will be evaluated in key disease areas with major public health burden. Here, the newly developed IGS will be taken into clinical environment and their real-world benefits will be evaluated together with clinical experts, European patients advocate groups and medical societies and considering regulatory and ethical implications. Thus, a framework for legally and ethically responsible translation into wider clinical practice will be developed. Moreover, the partners will develop and test the role of IGS in several rare diseases as well as COVID-19 infection and severity. Importantly, to support the application of IGS via public-private partnerships including clinical practitioners, an AI-enabled federated data analysis platform, the ‘IGS4EU’ platform, will be developed for automated IGS generation and interpretation for end-users. Additionally, the IGS4EU platform will allow access of the INTERVENE data and the methodology know-how to the AI community through a competition-based benchmarking environment. In the long term, the IGS4EU platform aims to grow the disease coverage and enable a wide adoption of IGS as a gold standard in clinical research and practice.

Enhancing stakeholder engagement in cancer research is essential for advancing the relevance, impact, ethicality, and equity of research outcomes. Engaging patients, caregivers, clinicians, researchers, and community representatives in the research process enables synergistic optimisation of potential impact. The PERIFORMANCE project focuses on promoting local action for Mission: Cancer and aims to leverage the federated biobanking domain as focal points for transdisciplinary research and innovation activities with European outreach. Biobanks, particularly those using population cohorts dedicated to cancer research, set the sampling frame to explore best practices and identify needs in the context of stakeholder engagement. PERIFORMANCE goes beyond the standard patient/public involvement (PPI) practices and adopts a quadruple helix perspective on stakeholders, which includes patients and donors, research and healthcare professionals, industry partners, and policymakers. By addressing the use of AI and EHDS in biobanking within cancer research, the project aligns with the call’s objectives to foster systemic solutions at a time of major sociotechnical transformations. Its emphasis on ethical, legal, and societal dimensions resonates with the call’s focus on ensuring that technological advancements contribute positively to public trust and societal well-being. PERIFORMANCE prioritises broad dissemination and training, ensuring its outcomes are widely accessible and scalable. Its approach supports the call’s goal of achieving broad, lasting impact across Europe, reinforced by an open call for bottom-up engagement exercises in diverse contexts, considering local or regional needs. PERIFORMANCE will contribute to the EU’s Mission: Cancer by fostering informed participation among stakeholders, enhancing the ethical use of new technologies and boosting the relevance and equity in public policy and research outcomes.

PREVENT improves upscaling of primary interventions for weight control management during childhood and adolescence to reduce cancer risks in adulthood. This relies on current evidence that relates excess body weight with increased cancer risk. Towards this end, PREVENT applies a series of implementation research actions in the following directions. First, it identifies barriers to current interventions and policies preventing them from upscaling to different geographical, socio-economic, and cultural settings. Then, it introduces new multi-actor and context-aware interventions along with new user engagement strategies to face the current upscaling bottlenecks; multi-actor in the sense that they target different types of users (e.g., students, family, educators, policymakers) and context-aware in the sense that PREVENT interventions are tailored to the specific implementation places (class, canteen, sports fields, labs, outside school). The PREVENT new policies are adapted, piloted, and scaled up within the schools’ communities of three European countries facing different epidemiological settings on childhood obesity, geographic, socio-economic and cultural attributes. The pilots are designed to be holistic end-to-end ecosystems, including users, medical professionals, policymakers, public authorities, and civil communities. They focus on the whole school communities of Greece, Sweden, and Spain-Catalonia, that is, PREVENT outreach to more than 3.3 million students, required for guideline provisioning, large-scale implementation, multi-parameter assessment, and scaling-up. Co-creation, active behavioral change, self-evaluation through user empowerment, motivational interviewing, social innovation, digital-assistive engagement, health apps, and multi-domain assessment are implementation research aspects of PREVENT to advance user acceptability and compatibility with existing policies, and thus improve sustainability and upscaling. This action is part of the Cancer Mission cluster of projects on "Prevention and Early Detection".

Adult and paediatric malignant glioma (GBM and pHGG) remain among the most difficult-to-treat cancers with 5-year survival rates of 300, including pre-post treatment samples) with matched controls (n>300) and exceptionally long-term surviving GBM patients (n~140), in which various tumour-host niches will be studied in how they respond to I/O perturbations and lead to improved clinical outcome. This will be empowered by deploying an UNCAN-compatible data lake, to which incremental data collection will be used to further refine the machine learning models, while proposing novel treatment options. This action is part of the Cancer Mission cluster of projects on “Understanding (tumour-host interactions)".

Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for nearly 10 million deaths in 2020, or nearly one in six deaths. Lung and liver cancers were among the top three leading causes of cancer death in 2020 with 1.8 million and 830.000 deaths, respectively. On the other hand, soft tissue sarcomas are relatively uncommon cancers diagnosed in about 1% of all adults, but much more common in children and young adults, accounting for 7–10% of paediatric malignancies; they are an important cause of death in the 14–29 years age group. Interventional Oncology involves miniaturized instruments (biopsy needles, ablation electrodes, intravascular catheters) and minimally-invasive access, guided by imaging techniques (X-ray, ultrasound, computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging) – to target cancer with ablative or localized drug delivery strategies. Interventional Oncology can be used as a stand-alone approach, or in combination with the other approaches (‘pillars’) to enhance treatment efficacy. While cancer survival has significantly improved over time through innovations in each individual pillar, our current understanding of cancer now leads us to an intertwining of pillars and multimodal care pathways: Interventional Oncology is uniquely suited to leverage and enhance the effects of the conventional therapy pillars, while reducing the burden on the healthcare system. IMAGIO will leverage Interventional Oncology in the clinical setting to improve the cancer survival outcomes, through minimally invasive, efficient, and affordable care. We will deliver four complete, multimodal care pathways for two of the most aggressive cancers (liver, lung) and one of the most debilitating when treated with current approaches (sarcoma): 1. Multimodal interventional imaging for fast and precise radioembolization therapy of liver cancer; 2. Multimodal ablation therapy of liver cancer; 3. Multimodal diagnosis and therapy in early-stage lung cancer; and 4. Multimodal MR-HIFU-enabled therapy for abdominal sarcoma. IMAGIO will mature the next-generation interventional imaging across the full spectrum, from pre-clinical developments to impact validation in clinical trials. Expertise on Interventional Oncology and immunotherapy will be leveraged from pioneering clinical research centres and leading industry covering the full value chain of oncological care, as well as cancer patient and professional organisations. Such synergetic partnerships will accelerate the impact of the technologies and transform the way healthcare solutions are delivered, providing access to safe, fast, and effective care. By focusing on the local delivery of therapy, IMAGIO will drive the substitution of conventional higher dose systemic alternatives or invasive surgical approaches, thereby accelerating recovery, reducing complication rates and the number of patient visits.