Best Weapon In The War On Cancer? Hint: Your Mom Told You When You Were Three

"The answer, of course, is learning how to share. In medicine, the question is when, and how, to share data. The hope (and hype) of Big Data is that massive datasets can help researchers and companies slice and dice cancer into smaller, more manageable patient populations where companies can rapidly develop, test, and launch new cancer targeted drugs and diagnostics. The goal, of course, is to generate much better patient outcomes, at much lower cost, than the status quo. There’s also an increasing demand for companies to develop better metrics for demonstrating their products’ value to patients and the overall health care system. Sharing data (with appropriate protections for intellectual property) can help companies, researchers, and oncologists refine their understanding of cancer’s many molecular pathways—and fine-tune the algorithms needed identify key vulnerabilities, while matching drugs to the patients most likely to respond (essential to improving the 'value proposition' for patients, payers, and innovators) ...This is where projects like ASCO’s CancerLinq, NIH’s Biomarker Consortium, and Project Data Sphere come in. Project Data Sphere is the most recent, and in some ways, most interesting of the collaborations because it’s leveraging clinical trial data from some of the industry’s leading companies—normally fierce competitors—to build a research platform that will be, for most intents and purposes, open to all comers (anyone with a plausible research question which might lead to a better understanding of cancer) ..."