The National Cancer Institute www.cancer.gov has accepted the recommendations of a Blue Ribbon Panel (BRP)www.cancer.gov/brp on the ten scientific approaches most likely to make progress against cancer in five years under the Cancer Moonshot Initiative.
The BRP suggested approaches include:
- Engage patients to contribute their comprehensive tumor profile data
- Establish a cancer immunotherapy clinical trials network for adults but also directed towards the pediatric population to discover and evaluate immunotherapy approaches
- Identify therapeutic targets to overcome drug resistance through studies to determine the mechanisms that enable cancer cells to become resistant to previously effective treatments
- Create a national ecosystem for sharing and analyzing cancer data so that researchers, clinicians and patients will be able to contribute data
- Improve our understanding of fusion oncoproteins in pediatric cancer and use new preclinical models to develop inhibitors to target them
- Accelerate the development of guidelines for routine monitoring and management of patient reported symptoms
- Reduce cancer risk and cancer health disparities by developing, testing, and adopting proven prevention strategies
- Predict response to standard treatments through retrospective analysis of patient specimens
- Create 3-D maps of human tumor evolution to document the genetic lesions and cellular interactions of each tumor as it evolves from a precancerous lesion to advanced cancer
- Develop new enabling cancer technologies to characterize tumors and test therapies
In addition to the ten approaches, the roadmap also includes specific projects. One project includes a demonstration project to test for Lynch Syndrome a heritable genetic condition that increases risk for several types of cancer.