Crush it For Curtis Foundation: Clinical Trial Connector

Inspired by the need to advance bladder cancer treatments and advocate for clinical trial enrollments Crush It For Curtis Foundation developed a “Clinical Trial Connector.”  The Clinical Trial Connector explains to patients what a clinical trial is, what are the different phases of clinical trials and then allows patients at this time to search for clinical trials in Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and the Washington, D.C. area.  Today, Crush it For Curtis Foundation is announcing a new goal to add 5 more locations to the Clinical Trial Connector.  Patients looking to enroll in a clinical trial can view current clinical trials that are recruiting, by disease state, interventions, location, trial phase, and the direct contact information to contact for clinical trial enrollment. The CIFCF Clinical Trial Connector makes it easier for the bladder cancer patient to locate recruiting clinical trials and makes it easier to put the patient in direct contact with the clinical trial office. The hope in the future is to continue adding more locations and clinical trial sites to the list of the Clinical Trial Connector making it easier and empowering patients to self-enrollment in life-saving clinical trials.

Leukemia & Lymphoma Society: Pediatric Acute Leukemia Initiative

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society announces its plan to launch a Pediatric Acute Leukemia (PedAL) initiative, an innovative, international precision medicine approach featuring an integrated Master Clinical Trial fueled by living patient data to support the development of targeted therapies for children with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). The trial will use clinical, immunophenotype, and genomic data for real-time matching of diagnosed children to lifesaving treatments. Therapy for relapsed or refractory leukemia is often delayed due to slow progress in pediatric-specific treatments as well as the absence of a comprehensive platform to access and share patients’ cancer data.  This causes challenges in real-time matching and access to therapy. The PedAL initiative supports the preclinical development of new therapies, the preclinical and clinical validation of therapeutic targets in childhood leukemia, and a unique and transformative data platform that will give clinicians a real-time view into a patient’s cancer – including genomic and response data. Pharma partners and European investigators will be engaged from the outset to develop a global program. Sponsored by The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, this initiative brings together experts from the Children’s Oncology Group and academic partners and plans to involve industry collaborators and other international academic institutions.

Medidata Solutions: Digital Quality of Life in Oncology

Medidata Solutions announces The Digital Quality of Life in Oncology Meta-analysis initiative to form a consortium of clinical research sponsors and academic institutions that will use the Rave ePRO (electronic patient reported outcomes) mobile application across oncology trials for the continuous capture of patient activity and quality of life (QoL) data. As the patient provides responses to QoL questionnaires, a feature in the app passively determines the patient’s level of geographic coverage while preserving the patient’s privacy. The study will (1) determine whether anonymized, aggregated data collected from a smartphone can serve as a good predictor of clinically assessed QoL performance and (2) promote the use of activity and QoL data to facilitate exploratory analyses that could lead to novel measures and inform the development of new therapies. The consortium will look to perform a meta-analysis on its shared QoL and clinical dataset to produce digital biomarkers and other discoveries.

Medidata Solutions: Rave Omics Analysis

Medidata pledges to apply their algorithms (collectively called Rave Omics) to available clinical and omic data from pharmaceutical companies, academics, nonprofits or patient groups eager to take part in 1) finding evidence of omics-defined patient subgroups with higher or lower efficacy or rates of severe side effects and 2) further refining analysis algorithms, optimizing them for leveraging complex data-sets to improve patient outcomes. This pledge will look to identify results and develop analysis approaches that could be shared publicly and be valuable to fuel future precision medicine trials. Medidata Solutions has developed and continues to enhance methods for exploration of ‘omic markers, including automated identification of important markers from historical clinical trials data using machine learning. Medidata’s algorithms have proven value by independently identifying known, clinically important biomarkers (e.g., triple negative breast cancer) as well as producing novel findings (e.g., identification of novel patient subgroups with higher treatment efficacy, genes associated with adverse events and response, quality control issues, etc.).

National Pediatric Cancer Foundation

The National Pediatric Cancer Foundation (NPCF) will embark on a 2-year joint-effort to systematically address improvements for pediatric oncology (relapsed-patient) treatments, guidelines and pathways driven through data and science.  While formalized in the adult community, standards of care in pediatric oncology lag behind with resultant variation and possible recommendations for sub-optimal therapies instead of clinical trials. The outcome of this project would be to author evidence-based, collaborative, treatment recommendations for relapsed pediatric and young adult oncology patients to ensure they receive the best diagnostic and therapeutic services to increase the chance of a positive outcome. The NPCF will recruit partners to collaborate, participate, and support the development and will coordinate a working group at their annual research summit in February 2019 which convenes 22 institutional partners within their collaborative research network, the “Sunshine Project”. Partners include Children’s Oncology Group (COG), American Pediatric Homology/Oncology Nurse (APHON), National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN).

SignalPath Research: SignalPath Research Consortium

SignalPath Research announces the launch of the SignalPath Research Consortium. SignalPath is excited to announce a partnership with Genentech, known for its exceptional science and innovative solutions to clinical research, to optimize trial design and study conduct. SignalPath is also partnering with leading health tech companies, such as Florence Healthcare, to provide comprehensive trial solutions. By empowering sites, breaking down silos and optimizing the role of technology, SignalPath and its partners will ensure treatments reach patients faster and more affordably.

SignalPath’s mission is to bring treatments to patients quickly, inexpensively and with deep insights by building software solutions to optimize the conduct of clinical trials at sites. They are partnering with technology, research, and pharmaceutical companies to reimagine workflows, data streams, study designs, and analyses to efficiently answer the questions that matter. The resulting ecosystem empowers the redesign of clinical trials. To realize its mission, SignalPath is partnering with sophisticated oncology clinical research sites across the United States such as New York Cancer and Blood Specialists to develop and deploy novel operational, financial, oversight, and startup tools to support clinical trial workflows from end to end. SignalPath sites are anticipated to represent over 20% of oncology care in 2018.