CHIC proposes the development of clinical trial driven tools, services and secure infrastructure that will support the creation of multiscale cancer hyper-models (integrative models). The latter are defined as choreographies of component models, each one describing a biological process at a characteristic spatiotemporal scale, and of relation models/metamodels defining the relations across scales. Integrative models can become component models for other integrative models. The development of a secure hypermodelling infrastructure consisting primarily of a hypermodelling editor and a hypermodelling execution environment is a central generic VPH geared objective of CHIC.

 

In order to render models developed by different modellers semantically interoperable, an infrastructure for semantic metadata management along with  tools and services for ontology-based annotations will be developed. Existing approaches such as the one developed by the EC funded RICORDO project will be exploited and extended. Facilitated operations will range from automated dataset matching to model merging and managing complex simulation workflows. In this way standardization of cancer model and data annotation allowing multiscale hypermodelling will be fostered.

 

The following entities will also be developed: a hypermodel repository, a hypermodel-driven clinical data repository, a distributed metadata repository and an in silico trial repository for the storage of executed simulation scenarios, an image processing toolkit, a visualization toolkit  and cloud and virtualization services.

 

In order to ensure that the entire project will be clinically driven and clinically oriented, three concrete clinical trials/studies will be adopted and addressed. They concern nephroblastoma treated by combined chemotherapy, glioblastoma treated by immunotherapy in combination with chemotherapy and radiotherapy and non-small cell lung cancer treated by a combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

 

The multiscale data generated by these trials/studies will be exploited so as to both drive the development of a number of integrative multiscale cancer models (hypermodels) and hypermodel oncosimulators and clinically adapt and partly validate them.