Project Data Sphere® Cancer Research Platform Achieves Key Milestones: Data from More 100,000 Patients and Over 133 Research Studies

Cary, NC (Dec. 13, 2017)-Project Data Sphere, LLC has achieved two critical objectives in its mission to advance cancer care innovation and improve lives: data is now available from more than 133 research studies and represents over 100,000 patient lives.   Scientists can benefit from a single place to investigate cancer trials that span multiple sources – dramatically simplifying and accelerating the research process. With over 40 percent of patient lives captured in the platform now representing experimental arm data, the scientific value of the Project Data Sphere platform has dramatically increased since the platform’s capabilities were extended beyond supporting just comparator treatment study data in April 2017.   “Since coming online just three years ago, Project Data Sphere has made remarkable progress in amassing sets of data from industry and academia,” said Martin Murphy, DMedSc, PhD, chief executive officer for Project Data Sphere, LLC and the CEO Roundtable on Cancer. “Through open data sharing, Project Data Sphere has unleashed the full potential of existing clinical trial data and is speeding innovation that may lead to improved trial design, modeling of disease progression and endpoints and entirely new research gleaned from applying analytics to existing data. We are energized by these achievements, the publication of 10 peer-accepted publications, and our knowledge that these insights are leading to practice-changing care for patients.”   Achievement of these goals is possible through collaborations with leading biopharmaceutical and academic research organizations that provide patient-level data, with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) that enables NCTN/NCORP Data Archive data to flow into the Project Data Sphere platform, and with companies like Merck KGaA with whom Project Data Sphere, LLC has recently launched the Global Oncology Big Data Alliance.    “Data from publicly funded research studies should be shared as broadly as possible and productive alliances are an essential component in pursuing NCI’s data sharing efforts,” said Douglas R. Lowy, MD, NCI deputy director. “Endeavors such as Project Data Sphere provide another opportunity for NCI to bring data from the NCTN/NCORP Data Archive together with those from industry trials. The 100,000 patients in the data collection of Project Data Sphere are an important milestone. However, now is not the time to rest. Data aggregation is not just our present, but our future, and we will be able to help more patients as we all continue to vigorously pursue data aggregation.”   A free digital library-data laboratory, the Project Data Sphere cancer research platform(www.ProjectDataSphere.org) was launched in April 2014 as an independent initiative of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer, Inc.’s Life Sciences Consortium. The registered user community has grown to more than 1,700 authorized users who have performed more than 9,200 downloads of data for research purposes for various cancer tumor types including bladder, breast, colorectal, gastric, kidney, lung, melanoma, myelofibrosis, pancreatic and prostate.    Other key accomplishments this year include the publication of the NEJM Sounding Board article, integration with The National Cancer Institute’s NCTN/NCORP Data Archive, the enthusiastic response from the FDA per its Oncology Center of Excellence Letter of Support and multiple new peer-accepted publications.   To ensure that researchers realize the full potential of this data, Project Data Sphere, LLC teamed with CEO Roundtable on Cancer member SAS to develop and host the platform. The analytical and data visualization tools donated by SAS facilitate analysis for researchers.   Next Steps In the coming months, Project Data Sphere, LLC will continue to focus on aggregating additional clinical trial data to further oncology research, with emphasis on implementing new crowd-sourcing challenges like the highly successful Prostate DREAM Cancer challenge, accelerating the investigation of rare but serious adverse events associated with immuno-therapy oncology treatments and enabling new research insights into outcomes associated with rare tumors.     About Project Data Sphere, LLC Project Data Sphere, LLC is an independent, not-for-profit initiative of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer Inc.’s Life Sciences Consortium. The CEO Roundtable on Cancer is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation founded by President George H.W. Bush in 2001 to develop and implement initiatives that reduce the risk of cancer, enable early diagnosis, facilitate access to the best available treatments, and hasten the discovery of novel and more effective anti-cancer therapies. For more information, visit www.ProjectDataSphere.org, or follow the Project Data Sphere initiative on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ProjDataSphere.