The CEO Roundtable on Cancer honored the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with the 2017 Dr. Charles A. Sanders Life Sciences Award in recognition of their continued and expanded collaboration with the CEO Roundtable on Cancer’s Life Sciences Consortium and Project Data Sphere, LLC.
The award recognizes outstanding efforts for research innovation and collaboration and was accepted by Sean Khozin, MD, MPH, Associate Director (Acting) of Regulatory Science and Informatics, FDA Oncology Center of Excellence, at a dinner kicking off the CEO Roundtable on Cancer’s annual meeting.
“We appreciate the support of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer for Project Data Sphere and the opportunity to take part in this important initiative,” said Khozin. “Project Data Sphere has enabled the oncology community to gain valuable insights from aggregated clinical trial data sets, creating new opportunities to improve the lives of cancer patients based on open science discoveries and advanced analytics. We look forward to continued collaboration in the future.”
Examples of collaboration endeavors with the FDA include: a first-of-its kind Letter of Support for Project Data Sphere, LLC to encourage industry sponsors and academic centers to voluntarily share their de-identified patient-level data from adult and pediatric cancer clinical trials and other research studies; the ongoing FDA-Project Data Sphere, LLC Symposia; and co-authoring of the recent Sounding Board article published in the New England Journal of Medicine calling on organizations to share cancer clinical trial data with global researchers in a responsible way to advance cancer research for patient benefit.
“Cancer is a complex global health challenge and increased collaboration will increase research innovation for patients,” said Martin Murphy, DMedSc, PhD, FASCO, chief executive officer of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer.
“The Charlie” award was created in honor of Dr. Charles A. Sanders, former chairman and CEO of Glaxo Inc., who previously served as the Chairman of Project HOPE and director general of Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Sanders has been a driving force behind the innovation leading to improved drug development and has helped chart the course for health education and medical research in the United States and around the globe.
A free digital library-data laboratory, the Project Data Sphere cancer research platform (www.ProjectDataSphere.org) was launched April 2014 as an independent initiative of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer, Inc.’s Life Sciences Consortium. The Project Data Sphere cancer research platform contains 116 datasets representing 98,658 patient lives that are freely available to the world’s researchers. Data from Project Data Spherehas generated more than 21 peer accepted manuscripts in high-profile journals, as well as posters and abstracts, with additional publications in progress. The analytical and data visualization tools donated by SAS freely embedded in Project Data Sphere further facilitate these analyses.
About Project Data Sphere, LLC
Project Data Sphere, LLC is an independent, not-for-profit initiative of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer Inc.’s Life Sciences Consortium. The CEO Roundtable on Cancer is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation founded by President George H.W. Bush in 2001 to develop and implement initiatives that reduce the risk of cancer, enable early diagnosis, facilitate access to the best available treatments, and hasten the discovery of novel and more effective anti-cancer therapies. For more information, visit www.ProjectDataSphere.org, or follow the Project Data Sphereinitiative on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ProjDataSphere.