Amazon, Microsoft, NCI band together for Joe Biden's cancer moonshot
The National Cancer Institute, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft have partnered to build NCI an online repository for genomic data, the White House announced as part of its Cancer Moonshot Task Force report.
The technology companies will build a sustainable model to maintain and share cancer genomic and associated data on NCI’s data sharing platforms: Cancer Genomics Cloud and Genomic Data Commons. It’s designed to provide cancer researchers secure access for genomic analysis, visualization and computation, White House officials said in a statement.
The goal is to make it easier for researchers to mine stored data.
“Taken together, these current efforts and future plans signify an initial down payment for accelerating gains in preventing, diagnosing and treating cancer - that is, aiming to achieve 10 years of progress in half the time,” the report said.
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The report also noted that the industry now has innovative strategies involving scientific research, new and computational power to use in the fight against cancer.
This latest partnership was included with a flood of several new initiatives announced by the White House that are designed to further the goals of Vice President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot. The White House also announced Uber and Lyft - ride-sharing services- will offer cancer patients rides to their treatments in an effort to aid those in low-income communities.
Additionally, the CDC and FDA have plans to create a web service able to translate clinical notes into standardized data, with the goal of making it easier to integrate this information into databases. While the Department of Energy and NCI will create computer models to predict drug reactions.
With the Blood Profiling Atlas, pharmaceutical and diagnostic companies, universities and research centers will aggregate and improve access to tumor data, exosome assays, clinical data and sample preparation from 13 clinical studies.
“The Cancer Moonshot is about the entire cancer ecosystem working together to use our resources and tools intelligently and aggressively to catalyze improvements in care and our understanding of cancer,” the report said. “Ultimately, through the creation of new paradigms for generating, sharing, and integrating research and clinical data to enhance patient care, the Cancer Moonshot can accelerate the delivery of effective cancer prevention strategies, diagnostics and treatments to patients in communities around the world.”
Twitter: @JessieFDavis
Email the writer: jessica.davis@himssmedia.com
