The CAN.HEAL consortium will jointly address two of the Europe’s beating cancer plan (EBCP)’s initiatives: ‘Cancer Diagnostic and Treatment for All’ and ‘Genomics for Public Health’, because it recognises that prevention, diagnosis and treatment should be approached in a concerted way for the optimal benefit of patients and citizens and therefore aims at aligning clinical and population-based interventions. Within the Can.Heal consortium, 41 organisations from 17 EU countries will build on ongoing studies to promote the application of genomics to improve diagnosis and treatment of cancer patients, as well as to improve our understanding of the individual susceptibility to develop a certain type of cancer.

In the clinical arm in the project, responding to the ‘Cancer Diagnostic and Treatment for All’, the project focuses on applying ‘next generation sequencing’ technology and identifying implementation paths to facilitate harmonized data interpretation and treatment decisions, to employ the same or similar diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to patients with comparable cancer profiles across the EU, and to allow better counselling of family members regarding cancer risk. The project arm on ‘Genomics for Public Health’ will further develop estimation of cancer risks in healthy populations by polygenic risk score analysis within population-wide interventions as well as strategies for remote genetic counselling and telegenetics. The final overall goal of the project is to establish recommendations for initiatives into the EU health system that will further improve the access of individuals and patients to prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer through personalised medicine.

ACC has a prominent role in the project, as coordinator of the entire clinical arm and leader of the workpackage dedicated to prevention and early detection, in which tools and results from other key projects such as GerSom and oncNGS will be leveraged to tackle cancer as early as possible during the clinical history. 4 ACC associate members participate in can.heal as affiliated entities: IFO-IRE, FPG, HSR, IEO.