Vice President Joe Biden gave Civis Analytics CEO Dan Wagner a homework assignment earlier this year: to study the role data analytics can play in the quest to treat and cure cancer.
As part of Biden's Cancer Moonshot initiative, Biden met with Wagner and others in the data and analytics fields to discuss how data could help accelerate cancer research and lead to the potential discovery of treatments. Civis, a Chicago-based big data startup that was born out of the 2012 Obama for America campaign, was asked to craft data policy recommendations for the Moonshot team.
"The Vice President’s charge to us was simple: 'Tell me what I need to know. Tell me where we can make the most progress,'" Wagner wrote in a recent blog post.
For four months, Civis talked to pharmaceutical companies, academic research groups, insurers, non-profits, cancer survivors and others to help create data-centric policy recommendations for the vice president's program. They presented their full report at the Cancer Moonshot Summit in June, and they've started publishing blog posts summarizing their findings and recommendations.
The report, which you can find here, recommended that the Moonshot initiative focus on "systemic reform," rather than any one specific issue. The report says that we currently lack the "foundational requirements" needed improve data-driven cancer research. And in order to better use data, there needs to be a better data infrastructure to store and analyze large cancer research datasets, the right system for data sharing, and skilled experts to build the infrastructure and analyze the data.
"Right now, however, there are major systemic barriers that prevent the U.S. cancer research system from meeting these foundational requirements," the report says. "To fully deliver on the potential and promise of advanced data analytics in cancer research, we recommend reforms in each of these three areas: data infrastructure, data sharing, and people and skills."
To address these issues, Civis recommends that there be a government-funded network capable of housing large datasets that's accessible to researchers; the government should partner with research organizations and the cancer advocacy community to address privacy regulations and issues that prevent data sharing, and increase funding for patient-driven data donation programs; and the government should invest in data science jobs within the cancer research community, and facilitate public-private skill exchanges with the tech industry.
One startup working on at least some of these issues is Tempus, a Chicago company from Groupon Founder Eric Lefkofsky that's quietly "building the infrastructure to modernize cancer treatment." Tempus' website says it is helping doctors make real-time, personalized, and data-driven treatment decisions by "analyzing a patient’s genetic code in the context of molecular therapies."
But despite the challenges that exist in the industry, Wagner noted that there's "enormous promise" in using big data to tackle cancer.
"Despite its challenges, the industry has never been more hopeful about its future," Wagner wrote. "Our conversations suggest that there is enormous promise in bringing together individual-level genomic and clinical data, and using data science techniques to uncover patterns. By supplementing existing basic and clinical research with data science, researchers can accelerate the development of new treatments."
