by Angela Guess
Mike Orcutt recently wrote in the MIT Technology Review, “If Vice President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot is really going to double the pace of progress in preventing, diagnosing, and treating cancer, it’s going need a lot more data. That means it’s probably going to need more data-sharing arrangements like one announced at today’s Cancer Moonshot Summit in Washington, D.C., between the National Cancer Institute and Foundation Medicine, a biotech firm selling tests that sequence tumor genomes.”
Orcutt goes on, “To speed up advances, Biden has called for more data sharing and collaboration between cancer researchers in academia, industry, and the government. Foundation, which will give the NCI genomic ‘profiles’ of tumors from 18,000 adults, is the first company to contribute to the NCI’s new ‘Genomic Data Commons,’ a public database and analysis platform for cancer genomics. The new data doubles the size of the database, which is crucial to Biden’s project and to President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative. It will help researchers study genetic abnormalities seen in many cancers, and it could also help lead to new opportunities for treatment.”
He continues, “Before today, NCI’s database held sequencing information from the tumors of some 14,500 patients with cancer, including clinical data about how they responded to drugs. Large databases like this could help researchers better understand the nature of cancers and locate clues as to why some tumors respond to drugs and others don’t, and why some respond and then relapse. The information from Foundation isn’t so comprehensive; it will not include information about how patients responded to drugs. Nonetheless, it is a “dramatic” addition to the NCI’s existing data resources, says Louis Staudt, director of the NCI’s Center for Cancer Genomics. The larger the data set, the greater the chance new things will be discovered.”
Photo credit: Flickr/ Kumar Vaikom