ONCOSCREEN is a 48-month’s long research and innovation project, which seeks to develop new methods and technologies for colorectal cancer screening and early detection. The core objective of ONCOSCREEN is to enhance citizens’ awareness, participation, and acceptance of colorectal cancer screening programmes. The ONCOSCREEN Consortium consists of 38 partner organisations from 15 European countries (incl. including technical solutions providers, hospitals, Ministries of Health as policy makers, Insurance companies).

The project has been funded by the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, under grant agreement No. 101097036 and is part of the Cancer Mission cluster of projects on ‘Prevention, including Screening’.

With Colorectal Cancer (CRC) being accountable for 12.4% of all deaths due to cancer, and with only 14% of EU citizens participating in screening programmes, there is an urgent need for accurate, non-invasive, cost-effective screening tests based on novel technologies and an increased awareness on the disease and its detection. Furthermore, personalized approaches for screening are needed, to consider genetic and other socioeconomic variables and environmental stressors that lead to different onsets of the disease.

ONCOSCREEN responds to these challenges by developing a risk-based, population-level stratification methodology for CRC, to account for genetic prevalence, socio-economic status, and other factors. It complements this methodology by:

• developing a set of novel, practical, and low-cost screening technologies with high sensitivity and specificity,
• leveraging AI to improve existing methodologies for CRC screening, allowing for the early detection of polyps and provision of a personalized risk status stratification,
• providing a mobile app for self-monitoring and CRC awareness raising.

Furthermore, ONCOSCREEN develops an Intelligent Analytics dashboard for policy makers facilitating effective policy making at regional and national levels.

Through a multi-level campaign, the above-mentioned solutions are tested and validated. For the clinical solutions specifically, a clinical validation study has been planned with the participation of 4100 enrolled patients/citizens. To ensure the adoption of the developed solutions by the healthcare systems, their cost-effectiveness and financial viability will be assessed.

Our role

Timelex provides the consortium with a wide range of support with respect to legal and ethics-related issues. Since the projects involves processing of large amounts of highly sensitive data (i.e. health data), we were vested with the responsibility to ensure that the project is fully GDPR compliant. We were also tasked with the coordination of the efforts related to setting forth the data management framework of the project and we are responsible for drafting the OncoScreen Data Management Plan (D1.4).