“Revert (Targeted Therapy for Cororectal Cancer Patients)” is a European Project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. The project, which kicked-off the last 30th – 31st January in Rome, is coordinated by IRCSS San Raffaele of Rome, a leading research institute that aims at excellence in patient healthcare through innovative biomedical and preclinical research that generates results ready to be transferred to clinical practice and to the organization and management of health services. Moreover, the consortium involves Research Institutes and SMEs that are highly qualified in artificial intelligence (AI) models, data management, biomarker research and clinical oncology settings. The REVERT project will address the specific challenge of understanding at system level the pathophysiology of mCRC cancer in patients responding well or poorly to therapies, in order to design optimal strategy for mCRC on a case by case basis, with therapeutic interventions modulated depending on patient’s features. Accordingly, REVERT will build up an innovative artificial intelligence (AI)-based decision support system using the experience and the real-world data of several general Hospitals operating in the European Union healthcare system ultimately aimed at developing an improved and innovative model of combinatorial therapy – based on a personalised medicine approach – that identifies the most efficient and cost-effective therapeutic intervention for patients with unresectable mCRC. This goal will be pursued through the building of the REVERT-DataBase (RDB) thanks to a large number of standardized biobank samples with related structured data, and clinical databases (including known clinical and biological features as well as new, potential prognostic/predictive biomarkers) from several major clinical European centres. The RDB, in turn, will be used to build a sophisticated computational framework based on AI to evaluate its impact on survival and quality of life in a prospective clinical trial through testing of new treatment sequences of the available and authorised molecular targeted drugs in patients with mCRC.
Furthermore, among the winning keys of the project, different research centres operating in Sweden, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain and Italy will collaborate and cooperate with various SMEs. This will be the basis for the creation of a European network that includes SMEs, Research Institutions, Clinical Centres and Biobanks focused on R&D in the field of AI-Health for the development of personalised medicine.
