EU project ResPECT to build generative AI assistant for cancer and depression care

A new EU-funded project, ResPECT, will build a generative AI assistant for people with breast cancer or depression and for the health systems that treat them, cancer research organisation EORTC announced. The four-year project is funded under Horizon Europe's GenAI4EU call, brings together 22 partners and is coordinated by Heidelberg University.

The planned assistant has two parts. A medical assistant will let patients describe symptoms, concerns and needs in their own words and give clinicians short, structured summaries that combine those reports with clinical data and guidelines, with the aim of cutting documentation work. A policy assistant will pool patient experiences across populations so health systems can spot unmet needs and gaps in care, with dashboards comparing regions and patient groups.

The partners plan to test the medical assistant in a multicentre randomised controlled trial with patients who have early-stage breast cancer or moderate-to-severe depression, with clinical evaluation in eight European countries. The assistant is meant to be multilingual and GDPR-compliant. EORTC contributes its work on patient-reported outcome measures.