The sixth Australia Primary Cancer Forum will be held next month (23-25 October) with a focus on one of the most significant developments for Australian liver cancer researchers in decades – the Liver Cancer Collaborative Digital Research Environment (LCC DRE).
The LCC is a collaboration between research scientists and clinicians across all three tertiary hospitals and multiple research institutions in Perth, and in conjunction with Aridhia, the LCC have developed a secure, fully audited, digital environment to facilitate collaboration and innovation.
The Aridhia DRE runs on 11 dedicated hubs across the world helping researchers from over 80 countries collaborate on a wide portfolio of health and biomedical research programs ranging from paediatrics to neurodegenerative conditions.
The DRE connects the unique partnership of hospital clinics, cancer biobank and research laboratories giving researchers access to a growing collection of data that will underpin vital research discoveries as well as enable personalised and precision medicine.
Dr Louise Winteringham, a cancer biologist who leads the Translational Cancer Research Program at Perkins, including the Perkins Cancer Biobank, explained that the ability to integrate extensive clinical data would support a precision medicine approach to cancer treatment.
“This is a new type of platform for Australia, and we are one of the first groups nationally to create one of these trusted research environments. There are quite a few DREs across Europe, and they are already quite advanced in federating systems across national boundaries,” she said.
“Our goal is to share this with anybody that needs assistance with setting up clinical trials and to provide access for researchers across the globe that want to interrogate the data to develop new therapies.”
The LCC DRE provides a single ‘shop front’ for multi-mode data including structured clinical data in an OMOP-like format, ’omics data for each patient in a variety of raw and processed formats, and numerous biospecimen data on each patient.
Dr Winteringham said there was an urgent need for a redefined, enhanced, and revolutionary approach to make meaningful change to outcomes for liver cancer patients.
“Having a consistent dataset catalogue and metadata dictionary allows researchers and clinicians to explore and understand available data prior to requesting access,” she said.
Each data access request will be fully configurable, allowing individuals who are not members of the DRE (such as data owners, or members of a review committee) to be involved in the access request process. Users can track progress of their access request and are notified upon approval or rejection.
“GPs will be able to access any of the data as the LCC DRE will be open for medical professionals to view. This is a trusted research environment and is very well managed and incredibly secure. All the data from Australia stays on Australian soil,” Dr Winteringham said.
“The DRE is currently supporting multiple research projects across several identified areas of need in liver cancer treatment and management, and we are using several approaches to develop multi-omics-based biomarkers to predict clinically relevant events such as response to treatment, disease remission and recurrence.”
More information on the LCC symposium is available here.