Custom Loop help needed!

I’m currently designing & developing a theme for a research company.

– They want a general newsfeed on the site, simple enough.
– They also want pages for their individual research projects, also pretty simple.

Where I’m getting confused, is that on each project page they want a newsfeed side-column, showing only news from that project.

I assuming a good starting point is filtering all posts by category, so the general newsfeed only gets the ‘general newsfeed’ category of posts… Where I’m falling down is how I can create a template for project pages where the client will be able create a new project page (and then a corresponding post category type) and have this appear in the side-column.

I’m thinking if I can include get_posts in the loop of page.php I can somehow make the category of the posts the same as the page title… Any ideas on how to do this or am I taking the wrong approach? Is there a way to filter get_posts through custom fields?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Many thanks 🙂