Strategic partnership in Precision Medicine: Scientists from Heidelberg and experts from Roche deepen their collaboration

Each person is different and each tumor, too. A medicine that considers this complexity is called Precision Medicine – in the context of cancer it is named Precision Oncology.

The term Precision Oncology covers the aim to offer each patient a personalized treatment. At the end of February around 50 scientists and physicians of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the Heidelberg University Hospital met with employees of the company Roche for the ‘Precision Medicine Summit’ to develop and advance new projects in personalized oncology. This workshop was organized by the Roche-NCT Programm Office (Dr. Alexandra Farfsing and Dr. Martina Nesper-Brock) together with a Roche / Heidelberg expert team, who prepared the content and the topic of the workshop.

Interdisciplinary teams dealt very interactively with 6 key topics during the 1.5 work shop days. They discussed about innovative clinical studies, patient data and analytic, molecular information partnerships, efficient research and development, tumor board, data quality and data integration. ‘It were two intense days in which we could identify many innovative concepts. Now we have to make sure, to strike while the iron is hot and to use the gained results as fast as possible in patient care’, draws Professor Christof von Kalle, Director of the NCT Heidelberg, balance.

At the moment all teams start the elaboration of the in Heidelberg developed pilot projects about the topic Precision Medicine. The most successful Precision Medicine Project is provided a small starting budget to place the further collaboration on fertile ground for 2017/2018. ‘Together we would like to start already in the early development of treatment approaches new research projects to continuously improve diagnosis and therapy of cancer’, explains Professor Hagen Pfunder, Management of Roche Pharma AG. The for that necessary clinical studies will be performed at the NCT and in departments of the Heidelberg University Hospital.

The F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, one of the largest producers of innovative cancer drugs worldwide, is closely cooperating with the NCT, DKFZ and Heidelberg University Hospital since many years. In 2012 the cooperation was anchored between DKFZ, University Hospital and Roche in a cooperation agreement about personalized medicine in oncology and was extended by five years in 2015.