Canada’s Segal Cancer Centre at the Jewish General Hospital and Q-CROC (Quebec-Clinical Research Organisation Consortium) have selected IDBS’ Translational Science Solution.
IDBS will provide a support for its personalised medicine programme. The centre is redefining cancer as a collection of rare diseases, each with its own molecular signature. This has created a strategic need to employ a structured data approach so as to alleviate any analysis bottlenecks that are sometimes associated with translational research.
The solution will be used to support a new and unique programme across Quebec that prospectively collects all primary tumors. This system will be used to track patients throughout their cancer treatment. The system is designed to build a vast bio bank and accompanying database to easily identify and access patient sub-groups and support patient stratification in drug development.
Scientists conducting serial biopsy trials, initially with breast cancer, melanoma and colorectal cancer patients, will use the IDBS software to capture molecular signatures for omics data profiled from patients’ metastatic cancer tumors. This will help scientists to understand cancer subtypes and their characteristics and to determine the molecular signatures of therapeutic resistance to specific treatments. When patients’ tumors present a specific ‘signature’, treatments can then be targeted to match specific proteins to improve patient outcomes and also help them avoid accruing needless toxicity.
‘We need to understand cancer subtypes and their molecular signatures and this creates big, complex data sets. IDBS’ solution will enable us to capture, integrate and analyse not only our own data but also other data sets such as public sources. We need to perform extensive computer manipulation to gain even the most basic analysis. It is imperative we have a data management system in place that can handle not only this level of data interrogation but future more complicated demands,’ said Dr Gerald Batist, Director of the Segal Cancer Centre at the Jewish General Hospital, and Scientific Director of Q-CROC.
‘Cross organisational collaboration within translational science is crucial. Our patients want doctors and scientists talking and sharing with each other. Employing the IDBS solution helps build confidence and gets us closer to that goal. The more people get together, the more likely it is to see new things, or see old things with new minds. It’s time to kick down the walls to help cut away the research silos and collaborate with each other transnationally,’ said Dr Batist.
