$2.15 billion! NIH and 11 pharmaceutical companies work together to promote immunotherapy

Source: Wuxi apptec 2017-10-13 today, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and 11 well-known biopharmaceutical companies established a partnership for accelerating cancer therapies, PACT), a five-year, $215 million partnership between public and private research institutions, is part of the U.S cancer moonshot program Pact will first focus on identifying, developing, and validating biomarkers for standardized disease and treatment responses to advance new immunotherapies The partnership will be managed by the National Institutes of Health Foundation (fnih) and the FDA will act as a consultant "This new public-private partnership is a major step forward in the field of cancer prevention and can really help advance immunotherapy," said Dr Eric hargan, acting head of the Department of health and public services (HHS), "we are excited about this partnership, which will strengthen the efforts that have been made on HHS." The new immunotherapy has already produced remarkable effect in some cancer cases This is also the focus of biopharmaceutical companies investing heavily in providing new treatment options for patients who are not responding to other therapies But immunotherapy is not suitable for all patients Developing and standardizing biomarkers to understand how immunotherapy works in some patients, and to predict patients' response to the treatment, is an urgent need to maximize the population who benefit from the treatment ▲ Dr Francis S Collins, President of NIH (photo source: NIH) "we have seen significant response of immunotherapy, which can completely eradicate cancer in some patients," said Dr Francis S Collins, President of NIH, "we need to bring this success and hope to more people and more types of cancer, and we need to do this as soon as possible A systematic approach like pact will help us to succeed faster " Pact will promote the systematic and uniform clinical detection of biomarkers, so as to promote our understanding of cancer treatment response and drug resistance mechanism The research conducted under this cooperation will also integrate immune and other related tumor biomarkers into clinical trials by defining a series of standardized biomarkers tested in various studies This method can achieve consistent data generation and unified detection methods to support data reproducibility, cross test data comparability, and the discovery and validation of new biomarkers for immunotherapy and related combination therapy Pact will also promote information sharing among all interested parties, better coordinate clinical work, adjust research methods, reduce duplication, and conduct more high-quality trials "This complex scientific and organizational challenge cannot be effectively addressed by any single acting organization," said Dr Maria C Freire, President and executive director of fnih "On the contrary, it requires the efforts and resources of public and private partners to work closely together." Partners of pact include abbvie, Amgen, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, celgene, Genentech and Gilead Sciences, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen, Novartis biomedical research institute and Pfizer Additional support will also be provided by pharma The 11 partners will invest $1 million per year through fnih for five years, achieving a total private sector investment of $55 million NIH will invest $160 million over five years, when funds are available NIH's National Cancer Institute (NCI) recently issued a cooperation agreement, with a five-year investment of US $53.6 million to support four cancer immune monitoring and analysis centers (cimac) and cancer immune data sharing (CIDC) The four cimac and CIDC will form a network of experimental centers to support adult and child immunotherapy trials Cimac researchers will conduct in-depth tumor and immune analysis, and the data will be collected in the CIDC database to explore biomarkers of immune response This network will also provide the foundation for the core laboratory, test development and database functions required by the pact project The four cimac and CIDC of NCI cooperation agreement include Dana Farber Cancer Institute (cimac and CIDC), Stanford Cancer Institute (cimac), precision immunology Institute of Icahn School of medicine at Mount Sinai, Tisch Cancer Institute (cimac) and MD Anderson Cancer Center (cimac) ▲ Dr Douglas R Lowy, acting director of NCI (picture source: NCI), "NCI's long-term support for immunotherapy foundation and transformation research paves the way for the recent great clinical achievements in this field," said Douglas R "This partnership, and the data that partners are committed to making publicly accessible to a wider research community, will help us continue to make progress in finding cancer treatments that benefit more patients," Dr Lowy said