Public & Private Sector Actions to Advance Cancer Moonshot Goals
Vice President Biden Delivers Cancer Moonshot Report, Announces Public & Private Sector Actions to Advance Cancer Moonshot Goals
In response to the Vice President's call to action and in alignment with the goals of the Cancer Moonshot, representatives from government, academic, pharmaceutical and diagnostic companies are launching a new partnership in pursuit of creating an open database for liquid biopsies to potentially accelerate the development of safe and effective blood profiling diagnostic technologies for patient benefit.
The group of 20 stakeholders will launch a Blood Profiling Atlas pilot to aggregate, make freely available, and harmonize for further analysis, raw datasets from circulating tumor cells (CTC), circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), and exosome assays as well as relevant clinical data (e.g. clinical diagnosis, treatment history and outcomes), and sample preparation and handling protocols from 13 different studies. These studies will be contributed by AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly and Company, Epic Sciences/ Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Foundation Medicine, Genentech, Guardant Health, Novartis, Personal Genome Diagnostics, Pfizer, Thermo Fisher Scientific, University of Michigan, and University of Southern California and the Blood Profiling Atlas pilot datasets will be curated by a partnership between University of Chicago and Seven Bridges. Sage Bionetworks will contribute advanced analytic capabilities to the effort through a crowdsourced challenge sponsored by Celgene. The strategy of developing an open, well-curated public database would be similar to the database that FDA reviewed in clearing a next-generation sequencing based cystic fibrosis (CF) test nearly three years ago.
