QUALITOP

Cancer immunotherapy brought about significant progress in cancer treatment. It resulted in high efficacy in some cancers; e.g., up to 60% objective response rate in melanoma and 80% complete response rate in acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Nevertheless, two main challenges still impede improving cancer patients’ health status and quality of life (QoL) after immunotherapy initiation: 1) a crucial need for “predictive markers” of occurrence of immunotherapy-related adverse events (IR-AEs) to predict and improve patients’ health status and promote their QoL; and, 2) the lack of knowledge on patients after start of immunotherapy outside randomised controlled trials. To reach these goals, significantly more diversified sources of data are required. Project QUALITOP aims at developing a European immunotherapy-specific open Smart Digital Platform and using big data analysis, artificial intelligence, and simulation modelling approaches. This will enable collecting and aggregating efficiently real-world data to monitor health status and QoL of cancer patients given immunotherapy. Through causal inference analyses, QUALITOP will identify the determinants of health status regarding IR-AEs and define patient profiles in a real-world context. For this, heterogeneous data sources (big data), both retrospective and prospective --collected for QUALITOP from clinical centres in four EU countries—will integrate lifestyle, genetic, and psychosocial determinants of QoL. Using machine learning approaches, QUALITOP will provide "real-time" recommendations stemming from patient profiles and feedbacks via the Smart Digital Platform. Furthermore, an increased visibility on patients’ behaviour, a better IR-AEs prediction, and an improvement of care coordination will help analysing through simulation modelling approaches the gain in cost-effectiveness. Guidelines will be issued over the short and long-term.