Official Opening of the Horizon EU Cancer Mission PRIME-ROSE project

The PRIME-ROSE kick-off took place in Oslo on September 19-20 and gathered around 70 participants from different partners across Europe.

PRIME-ROSE builds on a bottom-up, investigator-initiated family of clinical trials in precision cancer medicine, which have successfully brought up inclusion rates to offer additional lines of treatment and provide patient benefit. PRIME-ROSE will use these adaptive and pragmatic clinical trial platforms to answer key questions regarding clinical effectiveness, provide health-economic evaluations, and contribute to scientific progress across cancers. At the kick-off in Oslo, PRIME-ROSE partners and key stakeholders met to go through the work plan and acceleratethe start-up of the project tasks.

The PRIME-ROSE vision is access to affordable precision cancer medicine that prolongs life at the best quality possible for all cancer patients. PRIME-ROSE organizes a growing ecosystem with distributed leadership across Europe focused on precision cancer medicine implementation. PRIME-ROSE also collaborates closely with the EU4Health project PCM4EU, that started inJanuary and in particular focuses on precision cancer medicine diagnostics.

PRIME-ROSE Coordinator Kjetil Taskén says: “Most importantly, PRIME-ROSE will allow us to search around Europe to find patients with rare combinations of cancer disease, biomarker, and treatment in parallel ongoing trials to build the evidence of what treatments are working for patients. This is a “triple-win” – for patients, investigators and industry partners – as we will build the knowledge base faster and more effectively”.

The public part of the PRIME-ROSE kick-off included the session “The growing ecosystem of DRUP-like clinical trials and European-wide initiatives PCM4EU & PRIME-ROSE” in the ACTA Oncologica Nordic Precision Cancer Medicine Symposium and took place on September 19. Here, all the PIs from the DRUP-like clinical trials in PRIME-ROSE gave short updates, followed by a panel discussion. The internal part of the kick-off took place at the Institute for Cancer Research, Oslo University Hospital on September 20. During this session, all eight work-package leaders presented their planned work in a nutshell and drew time-lines for upcoming deliverables and milestones.

Work package 1 lead by Hans Gelderblom (LUMC) will build a data aggregation platform and focus on data sharing. Ragnhild S. Falk (Oslo University Hospital, OUH) will lead the work on models for randomized external control arms in work package 2, whereas Åslaug Helland(OUH) leads work package 3, focusing on designing expansion cohorts. Work package 4 lead by Sahar B. van Waalwijk vanDoorn-Khosrovani (LUMC) will work with reimbursement strategies, and workpackage 5 lead by Katarina Steen Carlsson (Swedish Institute for Health Economics) will address the health technology assessment (HTA) challenges with precision cancer medicine. Bettina Ryll (Testbed Sweden) leads work package 6, focusing on developing the ecosystem and the corresponding need for social innovation. Finally, Katriina Jalkanen (Helsinki University Hospital) will be responsible for dissemination in work package 8.