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.
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.
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