To thrive in this digital age, an integrated pancreatic cancer research platform was developed to support clinical, translational and multi-omic analyses. This innovative initiative brings together data from 48 cancer centres. Using a standardised core data structure, it harnesses de-identified real-world clinical data on >3400 pancreatic cancer patients with matched annotated biospecimens to enable translational research and registry-based clinical trials that are run in parallel. This format allows merging of datasets, provides a solid interoperable data structure with “findable” clinicopathological/ genomic data. This creation of large longitudinal cohorts is critical for meaningful multi-omic analyses and biomarker discovery.
To date, the PURPLE platform supports >18 clinical and translational studies, pooling data on circulating tumour DNA (DYNAMIC-Pancreas clinical trial), proteomics, cytokine, (Pancreatic blood-based screening study), radiomics (CT, radiomic and sarcopenia study), immune cyTOF (Pancreatic Immune biomarker study), multiplex immunohistochemistry (DIRECT-InspIRE clinical trial), genomics and organoid drug assay analyses (Pancreatic cancer biobank models for personalised cancer care study).
No other clinical registry has attempted to link clinical data directly with a broad spectrum of multiple translational research projects. By bringing together individual projects under the umbrella of the PURPLE translational platform, we have streamlined and coordinated ethical, legal and logistical processes saving vital time for both the researchers and patients.
This exemplar platform demonstrates a multi-omic, multi-disciplinary and highly collaborative approach that is accelerating vital research in pancreatic cancer. By coordinating data and studies we can better map out the cancer genetics, molecular and cellular mechanisms that lead to treatment response or resistance in pancreatic cancer. This multi-sided platform is designed to address the needs of clinicians, researcher and patients. We plan to expand this platform to incorporate greater data analytic capacity, development of scalable pipelines, and streamline identification and access to molecularly targeted clinical trials in pancreatic cancer.