COBRED aims at discovering colon cancer (CRC) and breast cancer (BC) biomarkers for patient follow-up (monitoring markers) by exploiting the capacity of 3 state-of-the-art high-throughput technologies in an integrated systems biology approach. The specific RTD objectives are to

1. design a clinical protocol for prospective clinical BC and CRC collections that fit the needs of the 3 high-throughput screening technologies used: transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics
2. identify biomarker candidates (metabolites, proteins, PBL derived mRNAs) capable to detect and assess the status of minimal residual disease, metastases and recurrence after surgery and chemotherapy
3. develop a centralized database to integrate the data generated by the 3 technology platforms with the anatomo-clinical information of the clinical collections
4. discover biomarkers with better specificity and sensitivity using across-platform advanced datamining techniques on the combined data from the consolidated database
5. validate the biological relevance and diagnostic potential of the identified biomarkers by testing their specificity on tissue arrays and in relevant preclinical models

COBRED gathers the expertise and RTD resources of 3 biotech pioneer SMEs, leading academic partners and 2 clinical institutes renowned for their expertise in BC and CRC treatment. After 3 years COBRED will deliver a set of biomarker candidates verified in preclinical studies, ready for large scale clinical validation and further development for commercialization by the respective SME partners. Furthermore COBRED will have demonstrated the potential to explore consolidated data resulting from different high-throughput technologies and clinical profiles with advanced data mining technologies for enhanced biomarker discovery. Although within the project scope COBRED focuses on biomarkers for follow-up diagnostics, it has the potential to evolve to an early cancer detection & screening tool.