Euro-BioImaging’s involvement in Europe’s fight against cancer

Cancer cases in Europe rose to 2.74 million in 2022, an increase of 2.3% compared to 2020. If this uptrend continues, cancer will be the leading cause of death in the European Union by 2035. To curb this projection, the European Union launched its Europe's Beating Cancer Plan in 2021, reflecting a political commitment to leave no stone unturned to take action against cancer and putting stakeholders across disciplines and domains to work together towards saving lives. Euro-Bioimaging and its community actively participate in four key European initiatives empowering new research approaches to fight cancer. 

canSERV is a Horizon Europe project aiming to establish a collaborative network of research infrastructures to facilitate transnational access to state-of-the-art oncology-related services for researchers, universities, institutes, high-profile SMEs, and European research consortia. Euro-BioImaging's role in canSERV is to provide open access to Europe's most advanced biological and biomedical imaging services. 28 Euro-BioImaging Nodes are taking part in the project.

> Read more about Euro-BioImaging's involvement in canSERV here.

EOSC4Cancer (European Open Science Cloud for Cancer) is a European initiative seeking to improve access to cancer data on the medical, clinical, environmental and socio-economical fronts. The overall goal of EOSC4Cancer is to coordinate data from established cancer networks, accelerate the adoption of FAIR data standards, and collaborate to serve cancer patients and advance cancer research. EuroBioimaging, with its associated nodes, will provide metadata description alignment and develop tools to enable the generic use of medical imaging data.

> Read more about Euro-BioImaging's involvement in EOSC4Cancer here.

EUCAIM (European Federation for Cancer Images) is a cornerstone of the European Commission-initiated European Cancer Imaging Initiative, a flagship of Europe's Beating Cancer Plan, which aims to foster innovation and deployment of digital technologies in cancer treatment and care to achieve more precise and faster clinical decision-making, diagnostics, treatments and predictive medicine for cancer patients. EUCAIM aims to foster innovation and deployment of digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence, in cancer treatment and care diagnostics, as well as predictive medicine for cancer patients. The project is coordinated by the European Institute for Biomedical Imaging Research and involves 76 organisations from 20 countries. Euro-BioImaging and its Nodes will contribute to helping build the backbone for the next generation of cancer diagnostics and treatments.

> Read more about Euro-BioImaging's involvement in EUCAIM here.

UNCAN (Understanding CANcer) is a project from the EU-mission: Cancer and a flagship initiative from Europe's Beating Cancer Plan. UNCAN's ambition is to make the next significant breakthrough in cancer research to advance our understanding of cancer mechanisms and enhance prevention, early diagnosis, and treatment. This effort holds the potential to save millions of lives, laying a solid foundation for progress in Europe's fight against cancer.Euro-BioImaging is a trusted collaborator of the UNCAN initiative, along other European research infrastructures.

> Read more about the UNCAN project in “UNCAN.eu: Toward a European Federated Cancer Research Data Hub”, an article co-authored by Linda Chaabane, Euro-Bioimaging Med-Hub Section Director. 

To delve deeper on the involvement of Euro-BioImaging on cancer and imaging, you can read our series of seven user stories here:

• Mapping cholesterol in tissue to better understand prostate cancer
• Where do SupraMolecular Attack Particles come from?
• Endogenous DNA single-strand breaks in cancer
• Phospholipid imaging to prevent ineffective chemotherapy
• Golgi maturation-dependent glycoenzyme recycling controls glycosphingolipid biosynthesis and cell growth via GOLPH3
• Understanding and Fighting Cancer: Applications of Virtual Histology at the Phase Contrast Imaging Node in Trieste
• Conducting interdisciplinary transnational research in the COVID-19 era