PDS launches new data sharing platform to improve lives of cancer patients

Project Data Sphere, LLC (PDS), an independent not-for-profit initiative of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer's Life Sciences Consortium (LSC), announced today the launch of a new data sharing platform (www.ProjectDataSphere.org), with the goal of advancing research to improve the lives of cancer patients and their families around the world. The CEO Roundtable on Cancer was established in 2001 with the mandate to bring bold and imaginative solutions to cancer care.

"Globally, more than 8.2 million lives are lost to cancer every year. Making a difference demands a paradigm shift. The Project Data Sphere initiative, with its broad access approach, will help define an additional path to accelerate cancer research," said Christopher A. Viehbacher, Chair of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer and Sanofi Chief Executive Officer.

This platform has been specifically designed to provide one place where the community can broadly share, integrate and analyze historical patient level, comparator arm data from academic and industry phase III cancer clinical trials.

"The Project Data Sphere platform will enable the research community to bring to light previously unrecognized insights buried within vast amounts of cancer clinical trial data," said Howard Scher, MD, Chief of the Genitourinary Oncology Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. "The benefits of sharing comparator arm data could lead to a better understanding of disease progression and endpoints, and maximize a patient's contribution beyond a single trial to the benefit of others."

"Data sharing through initiatives such as the Project Data Sphere initiative has the potential to accelerate the speed with which clinical trials are conducted, improve the efficiency of trial designs and assist with the development of data standards applicable to all cancer types," said Robert J. Hugin, member, CEO Roundtable on Cancer and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Celgene.

Initial data sets have been provided by AstraZeneca, Bayer, Celgene, Janssen Research and Development, an affiliate of Johnson & Johnson, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Pfizer, and Sanofi US. PDS is currently working with these and other organizations, including the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology (sponsored by the National Cancer Institute), Amgen, and Quintiles to provide additional cancer data sets.

In order to ensure that researchers can realize the full potential of this data, PDS teamed with CEO Roundtable member SAS Institute Inc. (SAS), a leader in data and health analytics, to provide state-of-the-art analytic tools available to registered users within the Project Data Sphere environment.

The Project Data Sphere initiative addressed prior obstacles to clinical trial data sharing and worked with leading legal and privacy experts, as well as clinicians, commercial institutions and patient representatives to build an optimal framework to share data responsibly.

"The true power of this platform will come from an ever-increasing volume of data and the continuing engagement of a diverse global community focused on finding solutions for cancer patients," said Stephen Friend, MD, PhD, President, Sage Bionetworks. "One way that the Project Data Sphere initiative will leverage these data is through a series of focused research challenges." Research challenges are designed to draw on the diversity of expertise within the community to develop innovative solutions to challenging questions.

The first of these planned challenges addresses prostate cancer and is in collaboration with the Prostate Cancer Foundation, Sage Bionetworks, The Dream Project, academic experts from the University of North Carolina and the companies mentioned above who have provided de-identified, patient-level data.