Category: Project news

Joint statement from UNCAN-Connect, CANDLE and EU-CIP

The European Commission has established two digital flagship projects under Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan and the EU Cancer Mission: UNCAN.eu and the European Cancer Patient Digital Center (ECPDC).

The two platforms are designed to be interlinked in National Cancer Data Nodes (NCDNs), with the goal of ensuring cancer data interoperability between member states. In December 2024, three European projects under the Horizon Europe programme were funded to support this ambitious undertaking: namely UNCAN-Connect, EU-CIP and CANDLE.

The Commission has set up a specific Working Group under the Directorate-General for Health & Food Safety (DG SANTE), tasked with aligning on the core functions of NCDNs and ensuring coordination between the UNCAN.eu central platform and the ECPDC. The Working Group, named eCancer Working Group, is composed of national representatives nominated by respective ministries to reflect the specific needs of the different member states.

On Feb 10, the eCancer Working Group has published its recommendations on implementing the UNCAN.eu and the ECPDC platforms. The report sets out key governance, financing and implementation conditions required to make these platforms operational and sustainable across member states, in alignment with the European Health Data Space (EHDS).

The coordination teams of UNCAN-Connect, CANDLE and EU-CIP, on behalf of their respective consortia, welcome the publication of the eCancer Working Group paper and its comprehensive recommendations on the core functions, future governance and use of cancer data in Europe.

The report highlights that the success of both UNCAN.eu and the European Cancer Patient Digital Centre will depend on strong user-facing functions, clear governance structures, strong political commitment from member states, sustainable funding models and close coordination across all stakeholders involved. It emphasises synergies between existing digital assets, ensuring legal clarity in the designation of national entities, and supporting capacity building at national level. These cross-cutting recommendations are directly relevant to ongoing implementation work across multiple Cancer Mission projects.

• UNCAN-Connect contributes to the development of the UNCAN.eu central platform, supporting data sharing and interoperability across national cancer research ecosystems.
• EU-CIP is advancing the implementation of the European Cancer Patient Digital Centre information portal, with a strong emphasis on quality, accessibility and patient empowerment.
• CANDLE works with member states to develop NCDNs in alignment with implementation at the various national levels of the EHDS.

Taken together, these projects reflect a shared commitment to building a coherent European cancer data ecosystem that integrates research, care and patient engagement. The eCancer Working Group recommendations provide a common strategic reference point that reinforces the importance of coordination across projects, alignment with the European Health Data Space, and sustained pan-European investment. The consortia remain committed to continued dialogue with member states and to work closely with European institutions and the wider cancer community, with the aim of translating these recommendations into concrete, patient-centred solutions. This position paper serves as a benchmark in aligning the development of digital infrastructures in other potential clinical settings and domains.

Citation:

European Commission: Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, ECancer working group recommendations – Implementing the UNCAN.eu Network and the European cancer patient digital centre, Publications Office of the European Union, 2026, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/8011798

The EU-CiP project is closely aligned with other European Cancer projects like CANDLE and UNCAN-CONNECT. These three, in particular, are fundamental to building the architecture to support future proof improvements in cancer research data and patient support.

This article is a roundup of recent news across these Cancer Mission projects as they finish their first calendar year.

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CANDLE

The following items are from CANDLE’s social media where we recommend a follow to receive news first. You can also bookmark the project website.

• The CANDLE team contributed to SHINE 2Europe‘s webinar “Building Bridges in Digital Health Innovation”. [read more]

• The Dutch National Cancer Data Node (NCDN-NL), established with support from CANDLE, convened over 40 national oncology leaders on 8 December to shape an EHDS-ready cancer data infrastructure. Take a look at the event and access the slides.

• CANDLE shared a series of posts describing their work packages (stages of the project). Here is the post for work package one.

• The team held the first Persona Workshop with the EU cancer stakeholder community. This session aimed to build personas mapped to the functions of the National Cancer Data Nodes and the European Health Data Space context. [read more].

• Stay up-to-date with CANDLE news directly to your inbox with the newsletter. Here’s the first one.

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UNCAN-Connect

• Explore what happened at the UNCAN-Connect kick-off event with this day one post.
• The team have begun a partner highlight series of posts to profile the organisations behind the project and the roles they play. Here is the first instalment.

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EU-CiP

• The team put together a plain language explainer on how the project will achieve the European cancer information portal and support the national portal pilots. The story about this is on the website and this was the social post.
• EU-CiP coordinators, Harald Wagener and Prof. Roland Eils, Berlin Institute of Health Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, took time to discuss to build the #EUCancerInfoPortal in a special audiogram. It was also released on the project socials.

Creating a central hub – the cancer information portal – to house scientifically sound, accessible and reliable content and then working with member states to pilot national portals is not a simple process.

The coordination team have broken down the stages of the project for you to explore in more depth.

Puzzle pieces

On the new dedicated page, you can see how the pieces of the EU-CiP puzzle fit together including:

• An introduction to the partners
• How the content creation group and board will curate accurate information on all stages of a cancer patient’s journey
• Explanation on how technology will be used to create an information portal serving diverse needs with reliable, evidence-based information in lay-term language across Europe
• Development and launch of the pilot portals
• How social sciences and humanities (SSH) play a central role to address challenges of health literacy promotion, patient empowerment, and information accessibility
• Exploration of a transparent governance structure
• Information on EU-CiP as foundation layer to the European Cancer Patient Digital Center
• Links between sister projects (CANDLE, UNCAN-Connect) as part of EU Mission: Cancer and Europe’s Beating Cancer plan.

The EU-CIP project – part of the European Cancer Patient Digital Centre – launched at an in-person event at Charité Universitätsmedizin, Berlin on 12-13 June 2025.

The EU Cancer Information Portal (or #CancerInfoPortal for short) will be developed as the home for multilingual, reliable and easy to understand information for cancer patients and their families and carers in Europe.

Behind the portal’s development are 40 partners from 18 European countries. Here are just some of them!

At the launch, partners got straight to work in preparatory workshops, welcomed strategic input from the European Commission and mapped out the first few steps.

We will share progress of the portal’s development here and on our social media channels – listed below

• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Threads
• Facebook
• Bluesky