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CONNECT

Norwegian Precision Cancer Medicine Implementation Consortium

CONNECT is a novel public-private partnership driving  the implementation of precision cancer medicine.

Precision medicine changes healthcare. The implementation of precision medicine requires new types of interactions and partnerships among patients, clinicians, companies, regulators, and payors. CONNECT offers a new national arena for all stakeholders to jointly address key obstacles and pilot novel solutions to transform the current practice.

CONNECT is one of four interconnected initiatives in Precision Cancer Medicine (PCM) that will ensure infrastructure and collaboration on diagnostics, clinical trials, implementation of advanced precision medicine and use of health data, e.g. for health economics analysis. CONNECT and the associated public initiatives InPred, IMPRESS and INSIGHT (see information below) work towards common goals: giving patients access to medicines they otherwise wouldn’t receive, increasing the precision medicine experience of clinicians and researchers nationwide, generating data and insights important for analysing the outcomes and adopting health technology assessments and reimbursement schemes for these novel, personalized treatment concepts.

Via CONNECT a structured dialogue, information sharing and planning for national precision medicine and diagnostics implementation will be established in line with political guidance and ambitions. Oslo Cancer Cluster is coordinating the project and works closely with the 27 partners gathered in CONNECT already.

CONNECT is operationalized via four working groups engaging experts from the public and private sector and providing an interface to InPreD, IMPRESS and INSIGHT as public initiatives. These working groups address topics including advanced diagnostics for cancer patients nationwide, clinical trials and implementation of precision treatment building on IMPRESs Norway, novel mechanisms for funding and reimbursement tailored to precision medicine, as well as data capture, storage and use for secondary analysis.

CONNECT will be an arena for all partners and stakeholders to collaborate on important issues and will ensure a balanced, broad, and informed approach and debate.

Partners

CONNECT partner logos July 2021

Get involved

To learn more about CONNECT, please contact Jutta Heix, Head of International Affairs in Oslo Cancer Cluster and Project Lead for CONNECT.

For more information and news, please visit the project webpage https://www.connectnorway.org/

National initiatives for precision cancer medicine

InPreD

InPreD (Infrastructure for Precision Diagnostics) is a national infrastructure for advanced molecular diagnostics that will secure a robust, interactive structure facilitating clinical cancer trials on a national level by providing equal access for patients to advanced diagnostics, state-of-the art competence and technology.

IMPRESS

IMPRESS (Improving public cancer care by implementing Precision medicine in Norway) is a prospective, non-randomized clinical trial evaluating efficacy of commercially available, anti-cancer drugs prescribed for patients with advanced cancer diagnosed with potentially actionable alterations as revealed by standardized molecular diagnostics. IMPRESS-Norway is a nation-wide study and all hospitals with an oncology and / or hematology department will be invited to participate in the study.

https://impressnorway.com

INSIGHT

INSIGHT (Regulatory framework for implementing precision medicine into the Norwegian health care system) will develop an analytic framework for using synthetic control data for evaluating effects of small-scale one-armed clinical trials, as in IMPRESS-Norway. INSIGHT will use the developed control arms and data from IMPRESS-Norway and InPreD to evaluate cost-effectiveness of the PCM-model and suggest new reimbursement scheme that reflects the uncertainty in PCM.

Recent news

En forsker undersøker et celler fra en kreftsvulst. Illustrasjonsfoto: AstraZeneca

Nye kreftbehandlinger krever nye samarbeidsformer

Debattinnlegg: Innføring av nye legemidler for små pasientgrupper tar unødvendig lang tid. Noen blir ikke tatt i bruk i Norge i det hele tatt. Det er en utfordring, skriver artikkelforfatterne.
Smiling and looking into the camera is Lars-Petter Strand, Head of Medical & Country Manager Norway og Gry Lønne Eriksson, Medical Advisor Hematology and Oncology, Novartis.Novartis

Novartis enters IMPRESS

Novartis joins the IMPRESS oncology study with six of its cancer medicines to treat up to one hundred patients.