The European research project iPC (individualized Pediatric Cure) has started. It is about investigating the possibilities of individual treatment combinations in childhood cancer in order to maximize treatment success and minimize side effects.
In the next four years, 21 partners from eleven different countries, including nine European Union Member States (Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Netherlands, Slovenia), along with the USA and Australia will work together. The KiTZ scientists Stefan Pfister and Natalie Jäger are also involved as researchers and advisors to the consortium.
The project team will focus on identifying effective personalized medicine for paediatric cancers and will address a multitude of challenges. To meet these challenges, a comprehensive computational effort to combine knowledge-base, machine-learning, and mechanistic models to predict optimal standard and experimental therapies for each child will be proposed. The goal of the iPC project is to collect, standardize and harmonize existing clinical knowledge and medical data and, with the help of artificial intelligence, create treatment models for each patient. Armed with these treatment models, scientists will then test them on virtual patients to evaluate treatment efficacy and toxicity, thus improving both patient survival and their quality of life.
The iPC project has received 15 million euros funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
ICP press release:
More about the iPC-project:
More about the EU Research and Innovation programme „Horizon2020“: