Call for interest in Translational Cancer Research

Overview

The NCTCR initiative coordinated by the Luxembourg Institute of Health, has received seed funding by the FNR to set up the future National Centre for Translational Cancer Research. The objective is to bring together the various stakeholders throughout oncology (scientists, medical doctors, care providers, patient-support groups, sponsors …) to consolidate the consortium and collect ideas.

The NCTCR will aim to stimulate translational cancer research and build bridges between scientific developments and patient care. The NCTCR initiative will become a cornerstone for future precision cancer therapeutics in Luxembourg and drive patient-oriented research towards precision oncology.

CONTEXT

A call is launched to identify collaborative translational research projects focused on the domains below. The selected proposals will be integrated into the next phase of the final application to the sponsors. Integrative proposals covering more than one thematic involving clinicians and scientists will be appreciated.

Prevention & Care

High resolution epidemiology data impacting on life style, quality of care and quality of life. This thematic will focus on improving prevention, early cancer detection, quality of treatment and quality of life. It will make use of high resolution data from the cancer registry and connect with secondary data sources (e.g. socioeconomic databases).

Digital Technologies and Patient-Reported Outcomes

Patient-centric cancer care and research. The use of digital technologies will be investigated for real-life monitoring of cancer patients: to promote the inclusion of Patient-Reported Outcomes in routine cancer care and to identify digital biomarkers for personalized cancer care.

Multi-omics Patient Profiling

Precision oncology to improve cancer diagnostic and treatment. Comprehensive molecular profiling of patient tumors and the tumor ecosystem. This includes e.g. genomics, epigenetic profiling, transcriptomics, immunophenotyping as well as development of bioinformatic pipelines for integrative data analysis.

Complex Patient-based Models

Improving pre-clinical model systems for clinically relevant output. Application of complex patient-based pre-clinical models incorporating components of the tumor microenvironment and immune system, (e.g patient-derived organoids, iPSC, organ-on-a-chip, microfluidics, in vivo humanized models), leading to clinically relevant drug/target validation and treatment advice (e.g. Personalized Functional Profiling, PFP)

Innovative Immunotherapies

Focus on experimental cellular immunotherapies.

Cell-based immunotherapies represent a promising breakthrough for cancer treatment and an active research focus to benefit from the full capacity of the immune system. Efforts for off-the-shelf solutions or personalized approaches of cellular adoptive immunotherapies could be envisaged to become available to cancer patients in Luxembourg.

Data Integration and Analysis

Making sense of large scale clinical/biomedical data. Various omics-data, clinical and imaging data will be generated or collected throughout the program, requiring high level bioinformatics pipelines for integrative analysis and development of AI-driven applications to improve diagnostics, treatment-decisions and patient care.

Call Guidelines

• Lead applicants must be based in Luxembourg.
• Project duration: between 6 months to 3 years.
• A realistic budget estimation is requested
• Application forms must follow the template (max 2 pages)
• Applications must be submitted electronically to nctcr@lih.lu by June 12, 2022.
• Review and ranking will be done by the SAB of the NCTCR INITIATE project. The evaluation will be based on scientific merit, translational impact and strategic fit into the program. The final assessment for integration into the proposal is subject to the NCTCR steering committee.
• Feedback to applicants will be communicated before the end of September 2022.

Our partners

Interested in participating?

Please note that the Call for Interest is now closed.

Simone P.
NICLOU

Contact

Scientific Advisory Board

Stephan Fröhling, Director NCT Heidelberg, Germany
Gilles Favre, Director CRCT Toulouse (IUCT-Oncopole), France
Otto Visser, Director Netherlands Comprehensive Cancer Organization (IKNL), Netherlands

NCTCR Steering Committee

Michel Mittelbronn, Barbara Klink, Carole Bauer, Sean Sapcariu, Frank Glod, Guy Berchem, Simone Niclou