PDS in the News
Patients who consent to participate in clinical trials are informed that their data will be used for both primary and secondary research purposes. When reassured that data will be anonymized, the overwhelming majority want the value of their data to be maximized through reuse.
While immunotherapy focuses on medicine at the personal level, many efforts to advance cancer care require data from a lot of different patients.Clinical trials, including those for immunotherapy treatments, are intentionally and meticulously designed to study the specific effects of a specific therapy on a specific type of patient. This level of control is needed to ensure the safety and efficacy of the treatments being studied.
As precision medicine advances rapidly, so does the need to better communicate the nature and implications of the increasingly more complex, better tailored treatments.
Despite the data explosion in the past 10-15 years, this has largely been “data unrealized” – its value has not been exploited. Subsequent investments in data integration strategies, technology, and analytics have transformed a medley of free-floating data points into an integrated, coherent message.
The eighth symposium co-organized by FDA and Project Data Sphere was hosted by Stanford University School of Medicine. The day was devoted to vibrant discussions around Artificial Intelligence in Tumor Processing – Needs, Requirements, and Challenges with a commitment to advancing image analytics through machine learning algorithms.
NCI Acting Director Dr. Doug Lowy and PDS' Dr. Martin Murphy talk about the organizations' synergy and mutual goals during the Fireside Chat -- a Symposium tradition.
An open-data, crowdsourced project from Project Data Sphere identified predictors for survival in castration-resistant metastatic prostate cancer through prognostic models that used CDISC-standardized data from the comparator arms of four Phase III clinical trials and enabled 50 independent teams.
Project Data Sphere is an example of the potential of crowdsourced historical clinical trial data. The cancer research initiative allows researchers to submit, collect, and analyze such data for the benefit of research in its online analytics environment.
The FDA cited collaborations with Project Data Sphere that aim to use medical imaging data to develop algorithms that can better classify tumors, and with the National Cancer Institute on a joint fellowship program to design “digital biomarkers” to use in drug development.
Project Data Sphere aims to accelerate research by providing cancer clinical trial data from various sources to “any and all scientists” – and has named pharma industry veteran Bill Louv as its new president to ensure it delivers.
