LIH has a coordinating role towards a new National Center for Translational Cancer Research (NCTCR), an initiative of the Plan National Cancer-2 (PNC2) from the Ministry of Health, which is seeking to foster research in translational oncology with a direct impact on patients and society.

In order to engage public and private stakeholders towards a consolidated consortium, the initiative has received seed funding from the FNR. This initiation phase will enable the development of ideas and building of a full proposal for the future NCTCR.

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 & 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.