CERIT-SC member participates in EU H2020 project as the IT task leader

The CERIT-SC team represents Masaryk University in the consortium of a starting EU H2020 project EDIReX: European Distributed Infrastructure for Research on patient-derived cancer Xenografts. The 4 years project involves 19 partners, members of the EurOPDX consortium (http://europdx.eu), from 10 countries and started officially in February 2018. The overal project budget is 5 million EUR, with MU share of approx. 10%.

The overall goal of the EDIReX project is to establish a distributed European infrastructure for Trans-national access to patient-derived cancer xenograft models (PDX) and to related data in translational cancer research in academia, clinics, and industry. The proposed EurOPDX Infrastructure will narrow the gap between preclinical and clinical research, using PDXs as reliable models of human cancer. It will integrate a collection of over 1,500 cutting-edge PDX models representing various (>30) cancertypes to the European – and global scientific community in the publicly accessible EurOPDX Data Portal.

Aleš Křenek (MU/CERIT-SC) leads the project workpackage WP1 “Informatics: Developing a public repository for EurOPDX models”, which will deliver infrastructure for integration and centralization of PDX data across the project partners. The WP1 goal is the development of the EurOPDX public Data Portal, where the data will be made available in consistent way, using also state-of-the-art tools (cBioPortal, GenomeCruizer, PDXFinder etc.). The setup will follow best practices of emerging European infrastructures (EGI, Elixir and BBMRI in particular) ensuring full compatibility.

The full text of official Press Release