It is only a gathering that occurs once a year but the PERFORM team reunited for the General Assembly in October and, it was a huge success. The meeting was hosted by PERFORM partner, bioMérieux and held at the picturesque Mérieux Université in Lyon. After the usual quick catch-ups over coffee and tea, the Assembly was opened by Professor Mike Levin, coordinator of the project. Prof Levin summarised the amazing work that had taken place over the past year and express his deep commendations to all the consortium for their hard work and dedication.

This was the third annual meeting for the PERFORM team and with all 18 partner organisations well represented, attendance was at capacity. PERFORM is due to draw to a close in 2020, so the General Assembly was replete with intense sessions of the yearly round-up of the work carried out in each work package, which was followed by a variety of energetic discussions of where the work can lead in the future.

Patient recruitment to PERFORM clinical trials has been excellent, with overall targets exceeded. There are 5,000 patients entered into the online main patient database. The successful recruitment means that there are very good numbers for downstream experiments - including a large-scale biomarker validation experiment in which selected ‘signature’ gene levels will be measured across large numbers of samples.

The Assembly also included a dedicated session discussing the scientific results of the EUCLIDS project (precursor to PERFORM, grant agreement no 279185). The meeting then concluded with a stakeholder event on the 24th October which was a panel discussion with bioMérieux’s Alexandre Pachot and Karen Bregel-Pesce focussing on the research impact and adoption of results into applicable outputs. Planning is already underway for the 4th and final General Assembly for October 2020 and we expect it to be an intense meeting of PERFORM impact and results.