On December 9th, the Consortium presented the results of the first year of research to the European Commission, obtaining extremely positive reviews: the project was recognised an extremely interesting innovative approach to a "transparent" predictive model and an extremely effective data presentation and virtual representation of the disease.
The EU-funded OraMod project continues the research conducted by the finished FP7- NeoMark that produced a set of prognostic bio-markers and a genetic bio-signature significant for re-occurrence of oral cavity tumors, a disease more frequent and with a very high mortality rate. Oramod aims to provide a technology platform and a diagnostic device allowing the early identification of patients at highest risk of bad prognosis.
Consortium
The project engages 8 partners from 5 European countries:
At a glance
Cancer patients’ management involves critical decisions, regarding best treatment to avoid disease re-occurrence, to ensure the most favorable prognosis, to avoid over-treatment but at the same time also prevent under-treatment and, most of all, to preserve the quality of life for patients. OraMod starts from the need of researchers and clinicians in the field of oncology to improve the representation of biological processes related to growth, dissemination and re-occurrence of cancer, with the aim to predict disease prognosis and to provide effective and personalized care.
The systemic nature of cancer impacts all levels of human physiology, from molecular levels up to organs and the entire organism. Traditional data visualization technologies are not able to address this complexity and combine visual representations of the different levels of physiology into a unified vision of the disease. OraMod project has the ambition to:
1. implement visual representations of the bio-physiology factors involved in oral cavity cancer;
2. realize a predictive model which is built on current knowledge as an incremental tool;
3. foster a collaborative case management through patient's data sharing.
The core of OraMod platform is the predictive model, which will be integrated into a web-based modular framework of tools, services and diagnostic devices supporting clinical decisions. They include a highly interactive Knowledge Assisted Visualization and Simulation environment for the "virtual" presentation of patients' data; a collaborative decision-making space to support the multi-disciplinary approach through the interaction of the different specialists; a sophisticated suite for image analysis and feature extraction for head and neck diagnostics; a portable RT-PCR device and a disposable personalized lab-on-chip for fast, precise, quantitative detection of the genomic markers included in the prediction model.
These tools will allow the collection and presentation of the multiscale data related to oral cancer patients, which will be used to build, by means of the OraMod model, a fingerprint of each patient's disease progression and to stratify each patient by risk of disease re-occurrence, lymph-nodes metastases and overall survival.
Achievement of the first year
The project has currently concluded the design phase: user needs and use cases have been defined, the clinical protocol approved by the Ethical Committees in the three involved hospitals (Head & Neck Department of Parma University Hospital, VUmc Medical Centre Amsterdam, Heinrich-Heine University hospital Dusseldorf) and in three associated clinics in Germany. Patients are being enrolled and data and biologic samples collected and analysed, along with diagnostic images. The technical development has progressed with the first release of the OraMod documentation system (i.e. the electronic health records), the genomic profile detection and evaluation algorithms. The user interfaces mock-ups are being validated by users and the data entry system is expected to be ready in the next months.
The Consortium has already started a survey of possible exploitation opportunities for the OraMod platform and for individual components (i.e. Image Analysis Tools, RT-PCR and lab-on-chip). Market analysis is ongoing, in parallel with the definition of a roadmap for products certification as medical devices and in-vitro-diagnostic devices.
More incisive actions to involve stakeholders and potential targets for market exploitation will be performed in the next months, with the support of the OraMod platform prototype and evidence-based data to demonstrate the added value and the impacts of OraMod for supporting clinical decisions on OSCC patients management.
OraMod First technical Review
On December 9th, the Consortium presented the results of the first year of research to the European Commission in Brussels showing the documentation system, the preliminary genomic signature for OSCC re-occurrence, the upgraded lab-on-chip and the mock-ups of the Virtual Patient visualization tools. The result of the technical review was extremely positive: the project was recognised an extremely interesting innovative approach to a "transparent" predictive model and an extremely effective data presentation and virtual representation of the disease. Experts recognised the innovation in VPH approach in data fusion and data visualization and issued excellent comments.
More information on www.oramod.eu
