TAMPA, FL – Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., recognized for its research, clinical trials, prevention, care and personalized medicine, is about to get even more personal – powered with new analytics technology that will enable researchers to zero in on individual cells in a way they never could before.

 

Moffitt is building a research platform to accelerate personalized cancer care, rolling out technology developed by Oracle Health Sciences capable of digging deep, pulling data from existing systems and synthesizing it to provide new insight about treatment effectiveness for individual patients.

 

Moffitt is four months into the first phase of the project, which is slated to be done in early fall.

The new technology will replace a number of different types of systems and databases cobbled together – a platform that Moffitt CIO Mark Hulse, RN, said the organization is outgrowing.

 

“We really needed something that was going to be a next generation health and research analytics platform,” he said.

 

“They had struggled with the components they acquired with the past generation of analytical technologies,” said Kris Joshi, vice president of healthcare product strategy in Oracle Health Sciences’ global business unit. “They just didn’t cut it for them, because the magnitude of the challenge they were faced with was quite unlike what previous tools were built for.”

 

The Oracle platform will support Moffitt’s Total Cancer Care program and Moffitt’s subsidiary M2Gen, which oversees the world’s largest cancer-focused bio repository linked to longitudinal clinical and molecular data.

The technology will make it possible for Moffitt to overcome two tough challenges – data integration and analysis, said Hulse.

 

“That data comes in the form of what we normally think of as clinical data that comes through our electronic medical records or through diagnostic studies that are being done, but through the tissue collection and molecular profiling process, we also have molecular data on those patients,” he said. “It’s being able to tie all of that information together that really helps us gain insight into the markers.”

 

“To give you a sense of scale and complexity,” said Joshi, “imagine clinical data coming in from over a dozen, perhaps even more, different institutions, the myriad of clinical systems it might come from, and then normalizing and transforming and aggregating that information in a meaningful way that is high-quality information that can then be provided to investigators, analytical users and to clinicians for decision-making.”

 

The more data Moffitt collects and analyzes, the better the chances of finding the right treatment.

More than 18 hospitals contribute to Moffitt’s data banks and more than 72,000 patients across the country are enrolled in the Total Cancer Care long-term observational research study.

 

The Oracle platform will advance analytical capabilities and offer a platform commonly used in the biopharmaceutical industry for clinical trial management and robust data analysis.

 

For Moffitt, it means being able to rapidly expand the number of health systems contributing to its Total Cancer Care program, which in turn means improving clinical trial efficiency and productivity. 

 

“Advances in science and technology promise to fundamentally transform the way we treat patients with cancer and other complex diseases,” said William S. Dalton, CEO and center director of Moffitt. “However, this transformation will only be possible through the synergy of healthcare information technology with scientific breakthroughs in the molecular understanding of disease, novel therapeutics and diagnostics, as well as a fundamental redesign of our healthcare delivery models.”