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NIH Partners With 11 Leading Pharma Firms as Part of Cancer Moonshot

The National Institutes of Health and 11 leading biopharmaceutical companies have now teamed up to accelerate research of cancer immunotherapy, a pioneering therapy involving the use of patients’ own immune system to fight cancer.

A who’s who of cancer drug R&D companies have banded together to help fund a $21

5 million drive at the NIH to explore relevant biomarkers that can help focus immunotherapies on the right patient population while cutting the amount of time it takes to drive better studies through the clinic.

The 11 partner companies are: AbbVie, Amgen, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Celgene, Genentech, Gilead, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen, Novartis, and Pfizer.

This new public-private partnership is a significant step forward in the battle against cancer and a real boost to the potential of immunotherapy,” Eric Hargan, who became the acting Health and Human Services secretary earlier this week, said in a statement. “We are excited for this partnership, which will strengthen efforts already underway across HHS.

The NIH plans to put up the bulk of the money itself, up to $160 million — depending on its budget — while each of the biopharma companies involved put up $1 million each for 5 years for another $55 million.

The Partnership for Accelerating Cancer Therapies (PACT), a five-year public-private research collaboration will initially focus on efforts to identify, develop and validate robust biomarkers — standardized biological markers of disease and treatment response — to advance new immunotherapy treatments that harness the immune system to attack cancer.

We have seen dramatic responses from immunotherapy, often eradicating cancer completely for some cancer patients,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D.  “We need to bring that kind of success — and hope — for more people and more types of cancers, and we need to do it quickly.   A systematic approach like PACT will help us to achieve success faster.

PACT will facilitate systematic and uniform clinical testing of biomarkers to advance our understanding of the mechanisms of response and resistance to cancer therapy.  The research conducted under the partnership will also integrate immune and other related oncology biomarkers into clinical trials by defining a set of standardized biomarkers to be tested across a variety of studies. This approach will allow for consistent generation of data, uniform and harmonized assays to support data reproducibility, comparability of data across trials, and discovery and validation of new biomarkers for immunotherapy and related combinations.  PACT will also facilitate information sharing by all stakeholders to better coordinate clinical efforts, align investigative approaches, reduce duplication and enable more high-quality trials to be conducted.

A scientific and organizational challenge this complex cannot be addressed effectively by any one organization acting alone,” said Maria C. Freire, Ph.D., President and Executive Director of the FNIH. “Instead, it requires the energies and resources of public and private partners working in close collaboration.

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