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canSERV Project Launch: Instruct Teams up with RIs, Oncology Experts and Patients Associations to Battle Cancer

01-Sep-2022

The canSERV project, aiming to defragment the landscape of European cancer research, launches today. Over the next three years, canSERV will enable academia and industry access to cutting-edge services and support from basic science up to clinical translation to foster personalised medicine for cancer patients.

A range of Instruct-ERIC centres and facilities will be open to access by scientists conducting cancer research, with the latest, most advanced structural biology techniques available to them. Structural biology is a key field in the oncology pipeline, so Instruct is proud to be an important part of the project. The ARIA submission system will also be utilised as the central hub for access provision in canSERV.

Key points:

• The EU funded canSERV consortium will make innovative services available to cancer researchers, therefore supporting the goals of the EU Mission on Cancer.
• Funded services can be requested through canSERV’s single, unified transnational access platform, managed by ARIA, built to integrate unique cancer research services from all consortium partners.
• The consortium is committed to sustaining long-term, continuously offered, access to current and future cutting-edge services for the EU and beyond.

The key objectives of canSERV are:

• To offer at least 200 different unique Personalised Oncology (PO) relevant and valuable cutting-edge services for life science research in Europe over the next three years.
• To establish a single, unified, transnational access and training for all services.
• To ensure data generated through oncology-related service provision will be fully compliant with the FAIR principles, and complement and synergise with other relevant EU initiatives (e.g., EOSC, UNCAN.eu).
• To sustain the network and unified resources of oncology-related service provision beyond the duration of the project long-term.
• Overall, canSERV will accelerate the process of translating theoretical knowledge into personalised oncology clinical practice, that will give cancer patients quicker and easier access to solutions and products.

Further detail

Last year, the EU Mission on Cancer founders suggested that taking interdisciplinary approaches could be the key to accelerating cancer research and finding new treatment options.

The canSERV project responds directly to this by providing cutting-edge interdisciplinary and customised oncology services across the entire cancer continuum. This will achieve a comprehensive portfolio of oncology-related research infrastructures services available to all EU member countries and beyond.

Jens Habermann, Director General of BBMRI-ERIC in Graz, Austria said:

“This support will make it possible for us to meet the needs of EU academic and industry users effectively and create a more streamlined, de-fragmented, European oncology RI landscape.”

Key to canSERV is the offer of world-class services valuable for all major stakeholders e.g., researchers, universities, institutes, high-profile SMEs, and European research consortia. The mission is to make cutting-edge and customised research services available to the cancer research community, enable innovative R&D projects and foster precision medicine for patients’ benefit across Europe.

The cross-cutting canSERV consortium comprises 19 partners from leading EU Research Infrastructure Consortia (ERICs), Research Infrastructures (RIs), scientific societies and patient associations.

Thanks to the transnational collaboration and complementarity of the consortium, canSERV will provide the widest and most comprehensive portfolio in cancer research, taking the scientific excellence in Europe, and beyond, a step forward.

Calls for the supply of funded services will be announced over the next few months and will be advertised widely across the community.

About the CanSERV Partners

The RIs demonstrate their complementarity, the coverage of the whole research pipeline from basic research to applied clinical research and their extended network:

• BBMRI-ERIC
• EATRIS
• ECRIN
• ELIXIR
• Euro-BioImaging
• EU-OPENSCREEN
• EurOPDX
• EMBRC
• EU-IBISBA
• INFRAFRONTIER
• Instruct-ERIC
• MIRRI
• ARIE

In addition to the RIs, canSERV includes other key organisations in the field of oncology:

• ECPC
• EORTC
• IARC
• Cancer Core Europe
• ARTTIC
• TTOPSTART

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