oncNGS consortium challenges the market to research and develop novel affordable solutions to provide the best NGS tests, for all solid tumours / lymphomas patients. The challenge will consist in providing: (1) efficient molecular DNA/RNA profiling of tumour-derived material in liquid biopsies by means of (2) pan-cancer tumour marker analysis kit including NGS analysis integrated with (3) an ICT decision support system including analytical test interpretation and reporting. Thanks to the provided solutions, oncNGS consortium will be able to address their common identified unmet medical needs: (1) Establishment of valuable common tumour profiling strategy allowing to provide equal access to innovative medicines to all; (2) Outcome research analysis after treatments with targeted therapies as diverse testing leads to lowering the pooling capacity of obtained results, needed to obtain large enough sample numbers to perform statistics analyses; (3) Application of such essential testing to all patients, breaking down current unacceptable inequities due to the high costs of current diagnostics tests. oncNGS is a strong consortium composed by eight buyers from five member states (SC and IJB from Belgium, IC and HCL from France, HC and LMU from Germany, ACC from Italy and ICO from Spain) supported by six entities with wide experience in their fields (AQuAS from Spain is expert in precommercial procurement, BCR from Belgium and INCa from France are experts in cancer control, IBSAL and VHIO are experienced in biomedical research in the field of haematologic malignancies and DCP is experts in intellectual property rights and freedom to operate analysis) oncNGS consortium will challenge the market launching a pre-commercial procurement procedure, a competitive process enabling the buyers to compare the developments carried out by the contracted suppliers through three phases: solution design, prototyping and clinical validation of a limited set of R&D supplies.

The 15-month coordination and support action “4.UNCAN.eu” will generate a strategic agenda to launch UNCAN.eu, a European initiative to UNderstand CANcer proposed by the Mission Board and the European Beating Cancer Plan. This research agenda will be built with the final aim of achieving a new breakthrough in cancer prevention and treatment that will contribute to saving European citizens’ lives and help ensuring an optimal quality of life to disease survivors. To reach a new level of understanding, UNCAN.eu will take advantage of recent advances in research data generation and data sciences. Reliable, high-quality cancer research data generated by experimental model analysis and collected from longitudinal follow-up of cancer patients will be shared and integrated at an unprecedented scale within a Federated Cancer Research data hub, in the context of the General Data Protection Regulation. This information will be used by relevant players in Europe and beyond to address urgent and essential scientific and medical challenges in cancer prevention, early diagnosis, treatment and survivorship, in males and females of various ages. These challenges, identified in close interaction with European patients and citizens, will be tackled through competitive, ambitious and innovative, cross-border and trans-disciplinary research programmes built in a problem-solving manner. The definition of challenges will integrate inequalities in cancer research across regions and member states in order to boost the research potential of less-developed regions in Europe. Players will be committed to open science principles, including FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) guiding principles for scientific data collection, management and stewardship. The new understanding gained from the collection and analysis of this wealth of data will apply secondarily to other diseases.