Vice President Joe Biden, who has personal experience of the heartbreak that cancer causes, has taken on humanity’s mortal enemy and aims to end the disease “as we know it.”
On Wednesday, at the National Cancer Moonshot Summit, Biden unveiled details of the battle lines and the strategies to outwit the disease. What’s more if Biden and other stakeholders are successful in this goal, another scourge of healthcare will also receive a death knell: silo, which over the years has become healthcare’s very own four-letter word.
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The plans outlined rest on a remarkable number of partnerships and collaborations all set to bring down the walls that would unleash greater sharing of clinical research data, facilitate researchers’ access to promising drug compounds, and bring the global cancer community — be it patients, or scientists or companies — closer.
“The impediment isn’t the lack of gray matter genius and ingenuity … It’s all this stuff that gets in the way,” Biden told the audience at Howard University, according to STAT News. “We have to figure out how to get out of the way, and you guys have to figure out how to get in each other’s way more.”
Here are just three of the efforts that the first-of-its-kind Cancer Moonshot Taskforce is launching that underscores the need to break down barriers.
- Expanding Access to Novel Compounds — The National Cancer Institute (NCI) is creating a public-private partnership with 20-30 pharma and biotech companies to speed up researchers’ access to investigational agents and approved drugs. By the end of the year, the first agents will be available to researchers who can get drug compounds through one pre-approved “formulary” list. This would allow them to test the compounds for new purposes or in new combinations. This cracks through a very big silo: the need for researchers to have to negotiate with each company separately for individual research projects. The news release from the White House says this process can take as long as 18 months. The hope is that having on pre-approved formulary list will hasten the start of clinical trials and can bring new options to cancer patients more quickly.
- Making Clinical Trials More Transparent — The NCI along with the White House Innovation Fellows has plans to re-design how patients and oncologists learn about and find information about cancer clinical trials. One aim is to inform patients and providers about promising trials in a timely manner, but the other goal is to also improve participation enrollment in those trials. The latter can help facilitate and speed up vital medical discoveries and cancer treatments. In the first phase of this redesign, clinical data hosted on cancer.gov will be made available through an application programming interface (API) for advocacy groups, academia, and others in the cancer ecosystem that they can directly get their hands on. The API will also boost the ability of outside innovators like Smart Patients, Syapse, Cure Forward, and Trial Reach, to build applications, integrations, search tools, and digital platforms. These can be built to fulfill needs of individual communities and can bring clinical trial information to more providers, patients, and their family members.
- Foundation Medicine Releases DNA Data to Boost Precision Medicine — Molecular diagnostics firm Foundation Medicine announced the release of 18,000 genomic profiles of adult cancers into the Genomic Data Commons portal (GDC). This represents the largest public data release of its kind to the NCI and in fact more than doubles the size of the NCI’s GDC database. Why is this de-identified genomics data useful? It can lead researchers to collaborate and find new treatments that can be tailored to a patient’s individual gene type. Many believe that precision medicine that abandons the one-size-fits-all approach toward patient care will have a lasting impact on cancers.
- UK and US Researchers Team Up to Develop Scanning Technology — The biggest reason for the body falling prey to cancer is the immune system’s inability to detect abnormal cell growth. Cancer cells can hide. Now, researchers at Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute and University of Southern California are teaming up to apply new cancer-cell detection technology to identify those patients who have a recurrence cancer after surgery or those who initially responded to treatment. This can help to identify cancer at its infancy before the malignancy spreads. The two research institutions will build and operate identical laboratories with real-time sharing of research data and experimental procedures. Thereafter, clinical studies will be jointly designed and deployed to quickly develop and test the technology in the clinic.
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The above were just a sample of the initiatives being undertaken in the National Cancer Moonshot. If cancer is overwhelmed in the years and decades to come, such silo-breaking may prove valuable to battle other diseases as well.
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