A key goal of the ‘Cancer Moonshot’ initiative is the advancement of precision medicine, with the goal of making more targeted therapies available to more cancer patients. And researchers believe that the time is right, with the new technological innovations, the new insight into the biology of cancer and big improvements in the handling of ‘big data.’

In 2015, SCIEX joined forces with Children’s Medical Research Institute (CMRI – Australia), to advance the promise of precision medicine. To establish the Australian Cancer Research Foundation International Centre for the Proteome of Human Cancer (ProCan™) facility, SCIEX is providing ProCan with the high sample throughput required for the industrialization of proteomics via a large suite of TripleTOF^® 6600 mass spectrometers and NanoLC 400 HPLCs, to create one of the world’s largest scale implementations of the SCIEX next-generation proteomics solution, featuring SWATH^® Acquisition and OneOmics cloud-based solution for the integration of multi-omics data. SCIEX and CMRI held an, invite only scientific symposium to commence the opening of the lab in September.

The alignment of CMRI’s ProCan facility with the ‘Cancer Moonshot’ initiative will help contribute to an unprecedented international dataset. The data will be made available for use by cancer researchers and physicians around the world – with an expected minimum of 8,000 patients in the United States and 50,000 Australians by 2021.

CMRI researchers have been developing standard operating procedures, which are crucial to ensure highly consistent data over the next seven years. “We have high reproducibility between machines, we’re collecting thousands of samples to analyze, and everything will be ready as we launch this journey towards revolutionizing cancer,” said Professor Phil Robinson, co-leader of ProCan.

The information generated by ProCan will eventually be free for anyone to access. This will help scientists all over the world studying cancer. What’s more, the library of information created will be a point of reference that can be used now and in the future to aid rapid diagnosis and treatment planning.

According to the White House Fact Sheet, the National Cancer Moonshot will work to accelerate research efforts and break down barriers to progress by enhancing data access and facilitating collaborations with researchers, doctors, philanthropies, patients, and patient advocates, and biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. The initiative aims to bring about a decade’s worth of advances in five years, making more therapies available to more patients, while also improving our ability to prevent cancer and detect it at an early stage.

References:
The White House Office of the Vice President Fact Sheet
ProCan’s ‘Cancer Moonshot’ role boosted by the NSW Government