Cancer Commons Joins Biden Cancer Initiative to Improve Access to Clinical Trial Info

Cancer Commons is teaming up with eight other healthcare innovators to form the Oncology Clinical Trial Information Commons (OCTIC), a shared platform that will improve cancer patients’ access to information about clinical trials.

Organized by the Biden Cancer Initiative, this collaboration also includes BreastCancerTrials.orgCiitizenEmergingMedGenomOncologyGenospace/Sarah Cannon Research InstituteIBM Watson HealthMassive Bio, and Syapse. Together, we’ll build the first release of OCTIC, which will unite each collaborator’s current technologies and approaches in a “best of all” solution.

The OCTIC platform will store information about clinical trials and make it accessible for patient matching and other data mining. According to a press release from the Biden Cancer Initiative, “the system will employ a single set of terms and rules, and a user-friendly interface for biopharma companies to readily enter and update their trials. The information will include patient selection criteria, trial locations, and patient participation requirements, all in a consistent, machine-readable format.”

Martin Naley of the Biden Cancer Initiative wrote in a Medium post, “The program is intended to be compatible with all parts of the clinical trials ecosystem. It can be the single point of data entry for clinical trial sponsors and investigators. Government registry programs can read directly from it, making them better. Patient advocacy organizations, health institutions, and technology developers can connect to it in order to power their services. OCTIC won’t compete with anyone; rather it will make many parts of the oncology clinical trial ecosystem more efficient.”

We’re thrilled to be part of this important project and look forward to working closely with our innovative collaborators.