Since we have been blogging here for a while it would only be fair to explain the context in which this blog post subscribes. In other words we should try and give a general idea of our communication philosophy and modus operandi.

For all the changes that have taken place in recent years in the communication industry, there is a famous phrase that still holds true and even applies to this modern era of diversified communication in a more accurate way:

“The medium is the message”!

And even though Marshall McLuhan did not live to “enjoy” the perfect application of the phrase he coined, it nevertheless serves a symbolic guiding principle to today’s complicated and ever evolving field of communication.

Having this in mind we designed a multi-faceted and cross-functional arsenal of tools to help us communicate our cause.

As a matter of fact we like to use the term dissemination more than the – more traditional – one, “communication” in order to encompass the variety of mediums we use in order to communicate our messages to different target-audiences and with different respective approaches.

So during this starting stage of the DESIREE project we employ the following tactics as part of our dissemination strategy:

Project Advisory Board – PAB: DESIREE is already putting in place a dedicated Project Advisory Board (PAB) in order to both request input on project direction but also as an effective means of targeted dissemination.

Scientific dissemination: The scientific publications of the project can be classified in two groups: Scientific and Technical papers. The project research outputs will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications in high impact journals and conferences.

Social media: Obviously we intend to greatly exploit them for project communication purposes to address the general public and targeted audiences, spreading the word and creating expectation about DESIREE contribution. Our first step is our twitter account, already up and running.

Website: The DESIREE public website is one of the key communication and dissemination tools for the project. It serves as a public window, in which the project communicates relevant information about its goals, progress, etc.

Newsletter: A regular DESIREE newsletter is planned, to be issued when key Milestones are reached or whenever there is relevant information to be disseminated, in order to present the progress of the project to the general public. The first issue is underway and you are welcome to subscribe.

Breast cancer is the most common and most deadly type of cancer affecting woman in the EU countries, with more than 460,000 new cases and 130,000 deaths in 2012 (EUCAN2).

Multidisciplinary Breast Units (BUs) were introduced in order to deal efficiently with breast cancer cases, setting guideline-based quality procedures, clinical decisions on cases based on consensus and a high standard of care. BUs consists of a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, including medical oncologists, surgeons, radiologists, radioncologists, pathologists and other profiles that periodically meet to discuss new and ongoing cases in order to take therapeutic decisions.

Despite the evident advances, daily clinical practice and case presentation in the BUs is hampered by the complexity of the disease, the ever-growing amount of patient and disease data available in the digital era, the difficulty in coordination, the pressure exerted by the system and the difficulty in deciding on cases that guidelines do not reflect. 

The amount of data generated for every case may be overwhelming. A single case usually lasts for months or years, with repeated cycles of diagnostics and treatments. The associated digital information generated is increasing exponentially. Medical images may consist of complex datasets, sometimes including 3D modalities such as Computed Tomography or Magnetic Resonance with increasing resolution and different sequences providing complementary information. Digital pathology slides of tumor samples are starting to be commonplace, with the advent of whole-slide imaging digitalizing the whole sample in a huge mosaic.

Furthermore, the advent of the massive sequencing era, is starting to provide crucial information allowing to characterize the tumor (tumoromics) or the possible reaction of the patient to the drug (pharmacogenomics). The potential of exploiting this information and comparing it with other cases is enormous.

Furthermore, clinicians have to keep up-to- date with an overwhelming amount of studies, evidence and new therapeutic options. What is worse, clinical guidelines, based on strong evidence, lag about three years behind the state-of- the-art in diagnostic and treatments that already impact every day care. Still, there are many gaps regarding the applicability of a specific treatment on a given patient, as clinical trials only represent a limited spectrum of the population the drug is targeting.

Clinicians in the BU have to deal with all this information during case presentation, creating a picture of the patient and a mental map of knowledge, and take a therapeutic decision, sometimes clear, sometimes uncertain, in a time span that may range from 3 to 10 minutes, most of the times with the only help of a few pictures.

The advent of the BUs has had an important impact in oncology practice, but may drown in an intractable amount of data. This is where DESIREE will come to the rescue…