Program Urges Increased Cancer Data Sharing

In an example of the continued push among industry, academia, government, and hospitals to share more clinical research data, stakeholders of Project Data Sphere, LLC (PDS), a non-profit initiative of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer's Life Sciences Consortium, authored a Sounding Board article in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine urging the responsible sharing of cancer trial data with global researchers. Allowing researchers direct data access, the authors say, is critical to eliminating siloes and expanding discoveries and learnings in oncology R&D for the benefit of patients.
 
To that end, PDS has its own open-access cancer data platform, housing a free digital library of data. The platform, launched in 2014, allows researchers to download, share, integrate, and analyze patient data, while keeping patient anonymity intact. Presently, the platform includes 72 datasets resulting from nearly 42,000 patient lives, and PDS intends to expand the data and optimize the sharing of learned resources for trial participants. The platform can be found here: www.ProjectDataSphere.org
 
The CEO Roundtable on Cancer, comprised of top leaders from more than 30 U.S. companies, was founded by President Bush in 2001.