Project: Integrative Personalized Risk and Therapy Stratification of Localized Prostate Cancer

Acronym	PersoProCaRisk (Reference Number: ERAPERMED2018-261)
Duration	01/03/2019 - 28/02/2022
Project Topic	Prostate cancer (PCa) is the most frequent diagnosed neoplasm and the third leading cause of cancer mortality with a rapid increasing incidence during the past two decades. Preventive examination via prostate specific antigen (PSA), (if indicated) needle biopsy, histopathological examination and consistent tumor grading has increased the detected number of patients with localized PCa and provided a first model for risk stratification to clinicians. However, this model has an imminent need to be rectified in order to a) stratify patient’s treatment (active surveillance vs. surgical intervention vs. radiation therapy), b) identify patients with high-risk tumors and c) improve disease progression monitoring. The presented consortium concatenates routine clinical approaches with state of the art omics and bioinformatics analyses. In detail, routine data comprising clinical course (including treatment, Gleason score, follow up and PSA course) and corresponding tissue specimens (derived at primary diagnosis) will be examined by proteomic analyses (deep proteomics) and Next Generation Sequencing derived from patient tissue and seminal vesicle plasma. These high dimensional data will be integrated into a) state of the art imaging techniques (PSMA PET/CT and mpMRI) as a radiomics approach and b) into statistical learning models for onset of events and time-dependent covariates. Based on training and validation datasets, random forests or other supervised classification methods will be implemented and genomics, proteomics and radiomics will be combined in a stepwise fashion. Early data management and neural networks will be employed to support the results. Limited access, fully anonymised data, among others, will participate to address data protection and GDPR compliance. The deep and potentially unbiased feature extraction will pave the way for personalized therapy predicting models and risk-profiles; with a strong emphasis on non-invasive approaches.
Network	ERA PerMed
Call	1st Joint Transnational Call for Proposals (2018)

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
1	University Medical Center Freiburg	Coordinator	Germany
2	University of Toronto	Partner	Canada
3	AP-HP (Assisance Publique- Hopitaux de Paris)	Partner	France