On 17 January, all the partners involved in the biological and pathological studies of the ChiLTERN project met in Paris for the second WP3 meeting. The main objectives of this meeting were to define the biological and pathological aspects – including ethics – of the upcoming PHITT trial and their integration with the ChiLTERN aims.
The most important issue that came up was the importance of obtaining enough biological material from diagnostic biopsies for assuring one of the most comprehensive biomarker studies ever performed in paediatric patients with liver cancer. Moreover, the need for access to the diagnostic clinical data at the time of receiving the biological material for research was underlined. Without this, it will be impossible to select the ideal cases for establishing experimental in vivo and in vitro models, as well as for selecting the highly-aggressive tumours that will be included in the planned high-throughput molecular studies.
Also, part of the meeting was focused on the different possibilities for the workflow of material, data and documents among partners. CINECA, one of the partners of the consortium, has recently opened their website tools to ensure coordination between local hospital staff and CLCN biorepositories (Spain and Germany) as well as among ChiLTERN partners. A meeting in Bologna in March was agreed in order to move forward on the definition of the electronic questionnaires for PHITT and ChiLTERN.
In summary, it was a very useful and productive meeting for understanding the requirements of all WP3 partners and their thoughts about key aspects of the project.
Posted on Thursday 16th February 2017