The ACGT project in retrospect: Lessons learned and future outlook

The objective of the ACGT (Advancing Clinico-Genomic Trials on Cancer: Open Grid Services for improving Medical Knowledge Discovery, www.eu-acgt.org) project that has recently concluded successfully was the development of a semantically rich infrastructure facilitating seamless and secure access and analysis, of multi-level clinical and genomic data enriched with high-performing knowledge discovery operations and services in support of multicentric, post-genomic clinical trials. In this paper we describe the way the ACGT consortium has approached important challenges in the design and the execution of the clinical trials such as the issues of data integration, semantics based data fusion, data processing and knowledge extraction, privacy and security, etc. Furthermore we provide a number of key "lessons learned" during the process and give directions for further developments in the future.