The European canSERV project – which aspires to defragment the landscape of European cancer research – commences in Brussels today.

Over the next three years, canSERV will enable academia and industry access to services and support from basic science up to clinical translation. The initiative aims to foster personalised medicine for cancer patients.

All services of the participating infrastructures will be linked on a common platform which will go online within the next few months. canSERV will connect, coordinate and align existing oncology and complementary research infrastructures alongside providing services synergistically. This will capitalise on the critical mass of experts and their extended networks.

canSERV aims to accelerate the process of translating theoretical knowledge into personalised oncology clinical practice, which will give cancer patients faster and easier access to solutions and products.

The project is aligned with the EU Cancer Mission declared by the European Commission last year, which suggested that taking interdisciplinary approaches could be the key to accelerating cancer research and finding new treatment options.

The canSERV project responds to this by providing new interdisciplinary and customised oncology services across the entire cancer continuum. This will provide a comprehensive portfolio of oncology-related research infrastructure services available to all EU member countries and beyond.

Professor Jens Habermann, canSERV Coordinator, explained: “The canSERV consortium will meet the needs of EU academic and industry users and create a more effective, streamlined and defragmented European oncology RI landscape.”