Practical Research for Innovative Cancer Control Management Office
Kazuhiko Aoyagi, Satoru Sekiya, Kyoko Minamoto, Sachie Ishibashi, Yoko Saito, Shizuka Yamazaki, Hiromi Nakagawa, Takashi Saito, Misato Jinno, Tomoko Morita, Yasuhiro Irino
Introduction
The principal mission of PRIMO, which stands for "Practical Research for Innovative Cancer Control Management Office", is to support the program supervisor (PS) and the program officer (PO) of the "Practical Research for Innovative Cancer Control (PRICC)" under the supervision of the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED), but PRIMO is also expected to extend its support to individual principal investigators (PIs) in certain areas, giving careful consideration to possible COI (conflict of interests). PRIMO was established in October 2017 within the National Cancer Center Japan (NCC) as an organization placed directly under the President and thus "insulated" from the NCC’s other functions or organizations.
The Team and What We Do
1. Research Progress Management System:
The Research Progress Management System was designed and developed to monitor the research progress by PS/PO, AMED staff and PIs by themselves. PIs are asked to register their research progress and other related information into the web-based system. The system enables adequate monitoring and may help to cope with difficulties and obstacles of each project or to boost the promising research in a timely manner.
2. Data mining support:
One of the challenging or pilot-like parts of the PRIMO project was the introduction of the "Data Mining" in the support. Two major categories have been identified in the data mining; 1) the macroscopic overview mainly for PS/PO, so that they could grasp the global trends and status of the entire cancer research scene to understand the Japanese research portfolio and its strengths and weakness, for a better strategic planning of the cancer research. 2) the microscopic or more focused, on-demand analysis, which starts with a given topic or keyword from the PS/PO. Depending on the specific requests, PRIMO uses several data analysis tools such as clustering and visualization of the data from multiple sources, including the literature, drugs, clinical trials, grants, intellectual properties and altmetrics. PRIMO have generated 4 macroscopic reports in the fiscal years 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2022 as well as multiple microscopic reports and presentations to the PS/PO.
3. Consultation for the PIs:
Senior scientists of NCC provided consultations on fundamental research and drug development strategy in response to the PI's request. In addition, The PRIMO Research Ethics Support Unit has provided research ethics consultation services to the PIs to advise on ethical, legal, and social issues that arise in the various stages of research from planning to publication. Moreover, in collaboration with the ethics support staff in P-PROMOTE, PRIMO jointly organized a series of the research ethics seminars. Additionally, PRIMO has communicated and collaborated with the intellectual property staff in another AMED cancer research project, P-PROMOTE, and provided individual intellectual property consultations upon the PI's request.
4. Technical and Strategic Support for the PIs:
In July 2021, a new initiative was introduced in PRICC as a trial scheme to help PIs who seek technological support and/or access to clinical specimens and other bioresources, such as PDXs (patient-derived xenografts) and the scheme was launched in earnest this year. PRIMO facilitates a match-making between the PIs and technological support groups for possible collaborative agreements.
5. Information dissemination through portal sites:
PRIMO has established a portal site to introduce not only this project but also all cancer-related R&D supported by AMED to the general public and to communicate the results of this project to companies and others. In addition, PRIMO has collaborated with JCTN (Japanese Cancer Trial Network) and released clinical trial portfolios for each type of cancer as "Cancer Treatment Research and Development Map" from the PRIMO website to help planning, evaluation and collaboration of the clinical and translational research.
Future Prospects
Fiscal Year 2022 is the first year of the second three year of the AMED project, which has supported PRIMO. The new PI in NCC has been granted with the second term PRIMO project starting from FY 2022, and PRIMO will continue to support PS, PO and PIs mainly in the progress management of each research and development task in the project. In this year, a scheme to promote collaborative research between PIs and research institutions that can provide advanced technology and bioresources were launched in earnest. In addition, consultations by senior scientists of the NCC were enhanced to promote the PIs' research. Implementation of the data mining support developed in this project could expand to basic as well as drug discovery research. The portal site will be also updated as needed. It is expected to be an AMED model for the whole cancer research and beyond in the future.