Forscherdatenbank
Prof. Dr. Martin Lablans
Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum
Im Neuenheimer Feld 280
69120 Heidelberg
Programm
Clinical Communication Platform (CCP)
Übersicht
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.
DKTK Junior Group Leader for Cancer Systems Biology
Single-cell approaches have not only revealed a wide variety of cell states, characterized by cells exhibiting striking differences in their transcriptional profile, but have also illuminated the mechanisms underlying state transitions in health and disease. Cellular plasticity and adaptive state changes have recently emerged as a basis for therapeutic resistance in cancer, and a better understanding of how cell state transitions are regulated is critical to develop therapeutic approaches that can overcome therapy resistance.
Our research focuses on understanding the mechanisms driving non-genetic cellular heterogeneity and therapy resistance in malignancy. Using novel single-cell sequencing approaches, we seek to develop new experimental and computational strategies to define altered cell states in both, cancer and immune cells. Our aim is to leverage a data driven strategy combined with single cell genomics and systems biology to address the challenges posed by heterogeneity in cancer, and to develop new strategies to overcome it, with the aim of translating laboratory-based findings into the clinic.