Earlier this year, US President Joe Biden set a goal to end cancer as we know it by improving prevention, screening, diagnosis, and treatment. In reigniting the Cancer Moonshot, the Administration will bring relevant departments and agencies together to form a Cancer Cabinet and has issued a call to action to the private sector to join the effort.

To address cancer on multiple fronts, two specified actions are: 1) target the right treatments to the right patients, and 2) seek progress against the most deadly and rare cancers, including childhood cancers. To answer this call, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is expanding its ongoing work with the Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN). Together, AWS and the CBTN will enable researchers and clinicians to share and analyze medical record, imaging, genomic, and other data in near real-time to speed development of new therapies for pediatric brain cancers.

This work will kick off soon at three of CBTN’s primary clinical sites— Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), Seattle Children’s Hospital, and University of California San Francisco—with the goal of expanding to other collaborating centers afterward.
“We strongly believe in supporting scientific discovery and shared knowledge via a collaborative, data-driven, and open-science approach,” said Adam Resnick, PhD, scientific director of CBTN. “AWS is leaning in to help enable the type of data sharing and accessibility we need to accelerate the pace of research and move faster towards an era of individualized care for children with brain tumors.”

Among all childhood cancers, brain tumors are the leading cause of death. Clinicians and researchers need better access to multiple types of data in order to identify an optimized, individualized treatment approach for each child and develop the next generation of therapies. Today, CBTN—which runs via a coordinating center at CHOP—has data sharing agreements with 32 institutions around the globe. At these institutions, patients are enrolled on local institutional review board (IRB)-approved protocols through which consent is provided for the sharing of de-identified clinical data, demographics, and medical history information. As a result, more than 30 types of de-identified brain and spinal cord tumor clinical and molecular data, biospecimens, diagnosis and treatment data, imaging data, and cell-lines are available at no cost to academic researchers. This open science model enables scientists around the globe to work together on finding treatments, saving time, and building on existing research rather than replicating it and keeping it siloed within the walls of their institutions.

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