Below the Belt Award

iTestis is a user-friendly, multi-disciplinary, web-based testicular cancer database. Data collected within iTestis will provide an accurate description of current Australian practices, facilitate retrospective data research projects, seek to answer biological research questions and provide a platform for registry-based trials. It will also record tissue location information from germ cell tumour patients treated in Australia. Once established, iTestis will become a valuable resource to the wider germ cell tumour community. While it is the most common cancer in young men, germ cell tumours (GCT) are rare compared to other cancers. Subsequently, in many instances, enrolling sufficient numbers of patients onto clinical trials is not possible. As a result, clinicians often look to data from retrospective studies undertaken by large international centres to answer these questions. While Australia’s reputation in GCT research remains strong through the leadership of the Germ Cell Subcommittee, the decentralisation of cancer treatment in Australia has made it difficult for any single Australian centre to accumulate sufficient numbers of patients to generate any meaningful research, whether that be clinical, retrospective or translational. iTestis will enable Australia to make large contributions to the G3 global germ cell collaborative group which conducts multiple retrospective data research projects. It may also give us the impetus to lead some of the projects. Some examples of recent G3 projects include: brain mets (led by Darren Feldman) and risk of VTE during chemotherapy (led by Ben Tran). Selected centres participating in iTestis will gain patient consent for archival tissue collection/analysis and blood collection/analysis to answer biological research questions and facilitate translational research. The availability of tissue or blood will be indicated within iTestis, so that at a later date, when there is a relevant research project, a query can be made to identify eligible patients with available specimens for translational studies (with approval of the investigators involved). Multiple clinically relevant questions can be answered using such a resource. Additionally, the resource can be used to join international collaborations such as the Craig Nichols led miR371 biomarker for stage 1 disease protocol or the Movember GAP5 biomarkers for platinum resistance protocol. Following the establishment of iTestis as a robust and reliable registry/database, there will also be capabilities to conduct registry-based randomised-controlled trials (RCT). Registry-based RCTs provide comprehensive data across multiple lines of treatment at no additional cost, with the in-built capacity to compare study eligible and ineligible patients enrolled on the registry for a real-world comparison.