The Burrill Report


It can be frustrating for patients and doctors trying to make sense of how to best go about treating someone with cancer. Once thought to be just one disease, modern biology is coming to the realization that every case is unique and every tumor has its own properties. Being able to leverage the reams of information that are being generated daily to personalize treatment is a daunting task for doctors and patients alike.

Fortunately, there will soon be an app for that. The American Society of Clinical Oncology and CollabRx, a developer of applications for researchers and patients, have formed a strategic partnership to develop innovative, web-based, decision support tools to enable physicians and their patients to better understand emerging cancer therapies and the specific genetic profiles of patients’ tumors that these drugs target. The hope is that armed with this knowledge, oncologists will be able to consider all possible options in the course of devising a patient’s targeted therapy plan.

CollabRx founder Marty Tenenbaum hopes to leverage information technology to personalize cancer treatments and accelerate research. His own experience with cancer taught him much about the need patients and doctors have for information about the treatment of the disease that is both personalized and actionable.

Through Cancer Commons, a non-profit he created, Tenenbaum hopes to capture data from patients who have been failed by available therapies and instead are being treated with off-label use of cancer drugs. The effort seeks to capture data that can allow researchers, doctors, and patients to learn as much as possible from individual patient experiences and help them match a growing arsenal of targeted therapeutics to the needs of individual cancer patients based on their subtype of the disease.

“That’s where CollabRx comes in—it builds web-based apps designed to take the information in the Cancer Commons and make it instantly available to patients, doctors and clinicians,” said Tenenbaum in a podcast from The Burrill Report.

The partnership with ASCO, which represents 30,000 cancer doctors, will initially focus on melanoma in the context of CollabRx's Targeted Therapy Finder – Melanoma, which is an online app that enables physicians and patients to identify diagnostic tests, treatments, and clinical trials associated with unique molecular profiles of patients’ tumors.

ASCO will provide access to its extensive knowledge base of publications on clinical oncology to help users of the app receive the most up-to-date and comprehensive information pertaining to the clinical testing of novel cancer drugs.

It will also make the Targeted Therapy Finder–Melanoma app available to its members via its website, ASCO.org, and to people diagnosed with melanoma through its patient information website, Cancer.Net [www.cancer.net/targetedtherapyfinder]. Cancer.net will assist in providing content curation for the targeted therapy finder by identifying the most relevant tests, treatments and clinical trials for each molecular subtype, based on the best current knowledge.

“Every patient and every tumor is unique,” says Tenenbaum. “Ideally one would measure every tumor, look at all available treatments, form a strong hypothesis to try a certain treatment, use it, and be able to capture what you learn from the treatment to inform others.”

He sees Cancer Commons as a 21st century replacement for journals that provide real time communication among participants in a field so that they can avail themselves of the knowledge that’s out there, form hypotheses and rapidly test them to see which ones work and which ones don’t.

“We want to transform the knowledge that’s in this model into information that’s personalized and actionable so that patients and their physicians can take action on that knowledge,” says Tenenbaum.


April 07, 2011
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-asco_and_collabrx_team_up_for_personalized_care.html