Summary

Providing the technical interface for the connection of all local databases
Since it is possible to differentiate human cancers by their molecular profiles, patient selection based on those profiles is becoming increasingly important. Modern biomedical research and individual patient treatment is only possible if researchers and medical professionals can find distributed data stock of samples and related tumor documentation. Therefor there is a need of simultaneous access to information from clinical cancer registries, biobanking and clinical trials. This information is mainly stored locally in separate databases at different hospitals and institutions. As central communication interface of the consortium, the Clinical Communication Platform (CCP) developed a technical and communication infrastructure that connects the local databases of partner sites such as biobanks, clinical registries and clinical trial information and provides access for all DKTK scientists through elaborated search tools. With these tools, the user will find and request both biomaterial and accompanying information about clinical data, biomaterials and trials from the whole consortium.
Our Team of IT specialists is responsible for the development and implementation of IT solutions regarding the technical aspects of data harmonization inside the consortium. Therefore, the CCP-IT designed an appropriate IT infrastructure enabling all partner sites to provide clinical and biomaterial data of cancer patients, scientific data, and describing data of clinical studies to the consortium by deploying a so-called bridgehead within their local institutions. The bridgehead is a set of software components and acts as an interface that creates the technical and semantic interoperability between heterogeneous databases of the partner sites to make relevant data available to the consortium.
The whole IT infrastructure has both central components as well as the bridgeheads as decentral components, which are operated under the sovereignty of every partner site. The data protection and its sovereignty in the IT infrastructure is regulated in a general protection concept that complied with the German data protection requirements. As of March 2017, bridgeheads have been deployed to all DKTK sites.