VP Joe Biden Announces the Launch of National Genomic Data Commons as Part of Cancer Moonshot During Annual Meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology

National public database will facilitate cancer research and treatment and advance precision medicine.

Vice President Joe Biden addressed the ASCO membership during a special session of the ASCO Annual meeting in Chicago (June 3-7). Mr. Biden’s talk focused on the White House’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative. As in his earlier address at the AACR annual meeting in April, the Vice President emphasized the need for collaboration, data sharing and to rethink how we reward research and design clinical trials.

At the ASCO meeting, Mr. Biden announced a new initiative of the Moonshot- a National Genomic Data Commons (GDC) that will centralize, standardize and make accessible data from large-scale National Cancer Institute programs such as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and its pediatric equivalent, Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET), two of the largest and most comprehensive cancer genomics datasets in the world.

The genomic data housed within the GDC, representing thousands of patients and their tumors, will be managed by the University of Chicago Center for Data Intensive Science and will be accessible to researchers for studies to enhance understanding of which patients are most likely to respond to targeted therapies, accelerate new drug discovery and guide the clinical management of cancer on a more individualized basis.

Commenting on the hope of the CDA, NCI Acting-Director Douglas Lowy, MD. Said, “The explanatory power of data in the GDC will grow over time as data from more patients are included, and ultimately the GDC will accelerate our efforts in precision medicine.”