World Cancer Day 2025: Showcasing I3LUNG at the HADEA Cancer Event

On February 4th, 2025—World Cancer Day—the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA) hosted a landmark event in Brussels, bringing together key stakeholders from EU-funded cancer initiatives. The event focused on the synergies and impact of projects funded through EU4Health, Horizon Europe, and Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan. Among the invited experts was Vanja Miskovic, AI expert from Politecnico di Milano and Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, partner of the I3LUNG project, who contributed to the panel discussion on “From Diagnosis to Treatment – Best Practices and New Frontiers”, highlighting I3LUNG’s role in advancing AI-driven personalized lung cancer treatment and its broader implications for oncology care partners of the I3LUNG project, who contributed to the panel discussion on “From Diagnosis to Treatment – Best Practices and New Frontiers”, highlighting I3LUNG’s role in advancing AI-driven personalized lung cancer treatment and its broader implications for oncology care.

Moderator: It’s a great pleasure for me, to discuss with Vanja about the possibility of personalized lung cancer treatments, using AI and this software you are developing. Could you tell us more about it, how we can support each other and when we can see your solution in clinical practice?

Vanja Miskovic: I will try to explain to you what we are doing right now in our research: when a patient goes to the medical oncologist, and the medical oncologist needs to give him/her a treatment plan, he’s dealing with an oncologist with lots of information. He needs to process all this information as fast as possible, so what we are trying to do is to help the medical oncologist to do this by using the tool we are developing: a decision supporting system tool that will use all this information available in the clinical practice, starting from CT scans, PET scans, genomic, clinical and demographic information, blood results, all the things that are available, and we are trying to put them together, using our multimodal tool.

We are trying to fasten the decision-making process by the oncologist by developing our tool, and right now we are focusing on lung cancer specifically, but this methodology and this approach is scalable also to all the other cancers.

Let me give you a specific example on lung cancer and how this work in practice, because this is a poor prognosis cancer, usually diagnosed very late, and we are specifically dealing with advanced metastatic non-small cell lung cancer. There is a therapy that in the recent 10 years the treatment is starting to change for these patients. However, not all these patients respond to this treatment called immunotherapy. Currently, there is not a reliable biomarker to say which patient will respond to therapy and which won’t. And this is a specific problem in our project that we are trying to deal with, so we are trying to personalize the treatment for the patients and use all this data that is available to conclude which patient will be the ones responding to the treatment. By doing this, we are trying to improve the efficacy of the treatment and reduce unnecessary toxicities that can be caused by it.

Moderator: How can the outcomes of the I3LUNG project be applied in real-world clinical practice after the project ends? Would you also like to validate your software through the network?

Vanja Miskovic: Our project’s strength lies in collaboration. AI in oncology is evolving rapidly, and interdisciplinary cooperation is essential. By sharing best practices with other initiatives—especially those focusing on data harmonization—we ensure that our models are clinically relevant and widely applicable. We really want to implement the tool in a clinical setting, because this is not enough, we need to validate the tool across more data that is coming from different demographic populations and locations.

Moderator: If we have collaboration with practitioners, academia, researchers, but also industry, patients and also policy makers, it would be an important solution for our action. So about your partnership, do you have a patient organization already involved in your project? Interaction with industry?

Vanja Miskovic: I’m very proud to say that we have a patient advocacy group, as a member of our Consortium, called LUCE. We also have psychologist representatives, legal department in charge of ethical regulations. Multidisciplinary team is something very emphasized in the I3LUNG. Also between us, me coming from a technical field, and our PI (Arsela Prelaj) that is coming from a medical field, together we started our research lab in Milano that is actually joint between our 2 institutions, and I think this is truly important because through this lab we have contact with each other in person, on a daily basis. Before making big decisions, we discuss all of it and clear how we want to continue the implementation and development of our tool. It takes a lot of time to handle multidisciplinary teams, but it is something truly important to make the project work.

Vanja Miskovic: It’s not just about building models—it’s about making sure they are validated, standardized, and incorporated into everyday clinical workflows. For that, we need close collaboration with regulatory bodies, professional societies, and oncologists on the ground. Differences in healthcare maturity across Europe present a challenge, with some countries leading in AI adoption while others are still developing the necessary digital frameworks. I3LUNG actively engages with partners across diverse healthcare settings to create flexible, adaptable solutions that can be tailored to different regional needs.

The HaDEA event emphasized that Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan and the EU’s Cancer Mission must work hand in hand to foster innovation while ensuring equal access to high-quality cancer care. Vanja’s participation in this panel reinforced the importance of synergy between research initiatives, showcasing how I3LUNG exemplifies the EU’s vision of a more interconnected and patient-centric oncology ecosystem.

By leveraging AI to enhance personalization, bridging the gap between research and clinical application, and promoting cross-project collaboration, I3LUNG is contributing to a future where cancer treatment is not only more effective but also more equitable. As discussions at the HaDEA event made clear, the next steps will involve translating these advancements into sustainable healthcare policies, ensuring that AI-driven precision medicine becomes a standard part of oncology care across Europe.

With this engagement, I3LUNG has taken another step forward in shaping the future of lung cancer treatment, reinforcing the EU’s commitment to research-driven, patient-focused innovation in cancer care.

Watch the World Cancer Day 2025: #HaDEA Project Showcase here (jump to minute 2:55:10 for I3LUNG topic).

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