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Cancer Commons Taps the Crowd For Treatment Advice

From Springwise: a web app that taps medical crowds for personalized cancer treatment.
" California-based Cancer Commons was founded by a cancer survivor who believes he would not have found the experimental therapies that saved him if not for personal connections at the US National Cancer Institute, according to a CBC News report. Accordingly, the free “open science” initiative hopes to help others succeed as well by creating new ways of finding individually tailored cancer information online. Beginning with melanoma, Cancer Commons is being developed one cancer at a time in partnership with leading professional and patient advocacy organizations, pharmaceutical companies, medical centers, and health informatics companies.

At the core of each resulting “commons” is a curated Molecular Disease Model (MDM) that lists the known molecular subtypes of that cancer and then links to the relevant pathways, diagnostic tests, approved and experimental (targeted) therapies, and clinical trials. Doctors and patients can input key factors and variables about the particular instance they're fighting, and the MDM will match those factors with the treatments that have been most successful so far. Clinicians and researchers, meanwhile, can post peer-reviewed clinical observations and data that may be too early for formal presentation but may still be useful for late-stage patients, for example, while physicians and patients can report outcomes and side effects. Ultimately, the site hopes to provide patients with “personalized, actionable information that can save lives, while providing the life sciences industry with a game changing infrastructure that will slash the time and cost of developing new drugs and diagnostics and getting them to patients."
More innovative ideas, here,  from Springwise.

From Health Care Strategist blog: World class oncology programs.


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