Dive Brief:
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The Blue Ribbon Panel, designated to advise the country on how to move forward with Vice President Joe Biden's Cancer Moonshot, has proposed 10 recommendations for what it sees as "the most compelling research opportunities" to fund in order to learn how to more effectively treat and prevent the disease.
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The recommendations rely heavily on the potential for technology to help researchers, clinicians, and patients across organizations collaborate on assembling and synthesizing data in new ways.
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Several of those efforts would involve the creation of networks, including a "Network for Direct Patient Engagement," a "Cancer Immunotherapy Clinical Trials Network," and a "Pediatric Immunotherapy Clinical Trials Network."
Dive Insight:
For the recommendations of the BRP to work, HIEs as we know them are going to need to come a long way in terms of interoperability. As Biden told health IT leaders at this year's Health Datapalooza, the power of big data to help cure cancer will depend on our ability to not only generate and collect it, but also to effectively share the data.
The proposed patient engagement network would involve offering patients comprehensive tumor profiling and collecting that data from patients eager to participate. Gathering such data in a linked network would help pinpoint "what works, in whom, and in which types of cancer," the panel said, as well as act as a pre-registration for patients or their physicians to be notified about clinical trials relevant to them based on their tumor’s molecular characteristics.
The immunotherapy clinical trials networks for adult and pediatric cancers would aim to implement a national strategy to find and study immune-based approaches, with the ultimate goals being to increase cure rates and develop vaccines to prevent cancers.
Some of the other recommendations include a "national cancer data ecosystem" to interconnect datasets and allow researchers, clinicians, and patients to both contribute and analyze data, and the development of new technologies to accelerate the testing of therapies and the characterization of tumors, such as implantable microdosing devices and computational platforms for integrating the data from such studies.