Two recent revolutions are driving the next cancer breakthroughs: the explosion of life-science data and the rise of powerful AI. SIB scientists are harnessing these developments to generate and enable new disease insights, faster diagnostics and personalized cancer treatments.
This work underpins Switzerland's position as a leader across the cancer-care ecosystem – from the collection and management of sensitive patient data to pioneering research, advanced clinical care and pharmaceutical innovation.
Connecting cancer data to unlock insights
To better understand cancer, SIB is making high-quality tumour and clinical data from thousands of patients available to researchers, health innovators and AI models.
Successes and ongoing projects include:
- federating AI-ready cancer data across Europe for the UNCAN research infrastructure as a partner in UNCAN-Connect, the 19-country, 53-partner consortium building the platform, and CANDLE, a 20-country, 40-partner consortium supporting its implementation;
- creating a secure patient data atlas to accelerate personalized therapies for high-risk cancers, as co-lead of the 34-member IMMUcan public-private consortium alongside Merck, the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC), Gustave Roussy and Bayer;
- turning unstructured PDF cancer guidelines into expert-validated, AI-ready data to help train models to predict treatment outcomes, in the AI Tumor Board project with Swiss hospitals;
- harmonizing cancer data across all Swiss university hospitals for the Swiss Precision Oncology National Data Stream – co-led by SIB Group Leader Olivier Michielin and forming a central pillar of the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN).
SIB is crucial to IMMUcan’s success. The institute structured all data in the tumour atlas, and facilitates the work of the data analysts by running analysis pipelines and contributing to clinical data curation.
Advancing cancer biology
Our scientists are further enabling cancer research by developing software tools – and are studying the disease at finer resolution than ever.
The following are recent selected highlights.
- Uncovering insights into how ovarian cancer ‘hijacks’ normal abdominal tissue to promote metastases.
Published in Nature Communications | SIB Groups involved: Computational Biology (ETH Zurich), DBM Bioinformatics Core Facility (University of Basel), PHRT Clinical Proteotype Analysis Center (ETH Zurich), and NEXUS Personalized Health (ETH Zurich) - Characterizing the heterogeneity of cells in and around prostate tumours and correlating this with patient outcomes.
Preprint | SIB Group involved: AI/ML for Biomedicine (CHUV) - Showing the central role of tissue mechanics in bladder cancer formation.
Published in Nature Physics | SIB Group involved: Computational Biology CoBi (ETH Zurich) - Discovering hundreds of thousands of previously unknown RNA variants in individual kidney cancer cells, with implications for understanding tumour progression and identifying therapeutic targets.
Published in Genome Research | SIB Groups involved: Data Science in Life Sciences (University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland) and Bioinformatics / Systems Biology (University of Zurich) - Improving the reliability of spatial omics analyses of tumour and immune cells.
Software tool: SPLIT | SIB Group involved: Translational Data Science (CHUV) - Enabling studies of a type of repeated DNA that can contribute to cancer development.
Software tool: ConSTRain | SIB Group involved: Applied Computational Genomics (Zurich University of Applied Sciences).
Scaling up Swiss capacity for precision oncology
Over 70 healthcare and research professionals across Switzerland have been professionally trained to translate molecular cancer data into clinical practice to date, through the country’s first Certificate of Advanced Studies (CAS) for Personalized Molecular Oncology. The programme is jointly organized by SIB in collaboration with the University of Basel, University Hospital Basel and Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV).
Converting insights into patient care
Precision oncology applies molecular knowledge of specific cancer types, subtypes and stages to each patient's tumour and clinical profile, to guide diagnosis, prognosis and treatment. Our scientists help turn this complex information into practical recommendations that oncologists can act on, fast.
Scaling up Swiss capacity for precision oncology
Over 70 healthcare and research professionals across Switzerland have been professionally trained to translate molecular cancer data into clinical practice to date, through the country’s first Certificate of Advanced Studies (CAS) for Personalized Molecular Oncology. The programme is jointly organized by SIB in collaboration with the University of Basel, University Hospital Basel and Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV).
Examples include:
- guiding the early diagnosis and treatment of all new cancer patients at Geneva University Hospitals (HUG) through co-development of the OncoBench® platform for routine tumour genetic analysis;
- supporting the identification of alternative therapeutic options for patients with hard-to-treat cancers, by providing expertise and multi-omics profiles to Swiss molecular tumour boards – multidisciplinary groups of pathologists, oncologists, geneticists and bioinformaticians that examine treatment-resistant tumours and rare cancer types;
- demonstrating that comprehensive melanoma profiles can be generated and analysed quickly enough for clinical settings (published in Nature Medicine);
- opening the door to less invasive diagnostics, through a method for genetically characterizing individual cells in cancer-cell clusters (published in Nature Genetics);
- co-developing a cost- and time-efficient tool to identify protein markers for immunotherapy (published in Nature Machine Intelligence).
In-depth features for cancer care
Enabling next-generation cancer care – SIB Profile 2026
Image credit: Keystone – Science photo library - Zephyr
