The use case PM4Onco (Personalised Medicine for (4) Oncology) aims to advance personalised medicine in cancer treatment. For this purpose, a permanent infrastructure is being established at the Medical Data Integration Centre Hannover to integrate and exchange data from clinical and biomedical research. This infrastructure lays the foundation for the establishment of personalised medicine in cancer treatment.

The consolidation of data from various clinical areas across all participating clinics aims to contribute to gaining new insights and optimising the effectiveness of treatment. The intention is to provide individually tailored therapy, which is the most effective approach for patients affected by cancer. The precise analysis of genetic changes in tumours at each stage of the disease enables an enhanced approach to targeted therapies, thereby significantly improving treatment options and prognoses for tumour diseases.

An important aspect of the use case is the opportunity for patients, with their consent, to benefit from the expertise of professionals from other locations as part of molecular tumour conferences. In this context, in addition to treatment and disease progression data, genomic data is also prepared and presented to the participating physicians. This makes it possible to identify similar patients in order to predict the further course of the disease and enable individualised treatment.

Particular emphasis is placed on promoting patient participation and improving patient education. Standardised and validated questionnaires to measure the subjective health status (Patient Reported Outcome = PRO) play a decisive role in assessing quality of life and the success of treatment. This information is currently rarely collected from patients outside of clinical studies. However, they not only enable more self-determination and participation of the affected patients, they also open up the possibility of identifying similarities between patients with the help of artificial intelligence and the inclusion of new complex biomarkers.

PM4Onco combines the expertise of the 23 participating centres from the four consortia of the Medical Informatics Initiative and the oncological centres of excellence in Germany.