What is the CGI-Clinics project?

The CGI-Clinics project was created to improve precision medicine and make it available to more cancer patients.

Precision medicine, which is sometimes called personalised medicine, means finding the best treatment for your cancer based on how your tumour is different. Doctors take a tiny sample of your tumour, and use advanced technology to study its DNA. They look for specific changes called mutations. Figuring out these changes can be tricky because tumours can have many of them. But it’s important for your doctor to find the ones that help manage the disease, and the ones that show which treatments may work well. Understanding these changes can help your doctor to find the best treatments.

Precision medicine is already available to some cancer patients, but there are challenges that make it a long and difficult process, and it is still not available to many patients. We want to help fix this with the tool we are developing, the Cancer Genome Interpreter (CGI).

In 2017, scientists at the Barcelona Biomedical Genomics lab at IRB Barcelona developed a tool called the Cancer Genome Interpreter (CGI) as part of their cancer research. CGI is a tool that can help doctors look at changes (mutations) in tumours. It finds the changes that make the cancer grow. The CGI tool was developed thanks to data from more than 28,000 previous cancer patients that have shared information about their tumours for research.

Now, with the CGI-Clinics project, those scientists and a group of other European institutions want to develop a new version of the CGI tool so it can be used in hospitals to help patients. When a sample is taken from a patient’s tumour and studied, we want doctors to use CGI as a tool to help them work out which mutations make the tumour grow. This will help them recommend the right treatment for that patient. We also want to help each patient to understand the information about their tumour and how this helped their doctor recommend the right treatment.

CGI uses special technology called ‘machine learning’ to learn from the information of thousands of previous patients. We want to continue improving the tool to help future patients to get the right treatment. To make the CGI tool better, we want to collect information from more tumour samples from cancer patients.

It’s important to know that every cancer patient’s data has value and can help other patients in the future. The current CGI tool was built thanks to 28,000 patients so far. As we develop the new version of the CGI tool, we want patients to benefit from the latest scientific advancements in the interpretation of cancer mutations.

In this video, some of the experts involved in the project introduce what we are trying to achieve, and explain why patients’ data is important.