Project data sphere to make cancer clinical trial data publicly available.

I n the mid-1980s, the emerging semiconductor industry had a problem. Many competing standards and manufacturing practices were a costly drag on progress. U.S. chipmakers realized that solving common problems and developing industry-wide standards would benefit everyone. They created Sematech, a joint venture that helped solve thorny technical challenges and yielded industry-wide efficiencies that no company could have accomplished alone. By the mid-1990s, the group globalized and today represents more than half the worldwide semiconductor manufacturers. Call 2013 the year that large pharmaceutical companies began to share in earnest. It started in 2012 when drug makers joined forces to create Transcelerate Biopharma, an independent entity that many of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies supported, Sanofi. The new organization will cooperate in precompetitive intelligence, such as creating standardized clinical trial formats, to reduce the cost of conducting human trials , the most costly aspect of bringing a new medicine to market. Realizing that data sharing was changing , Charles Hugh-Jones, vice president of medical affairs at Sanofi Oncology, proposed sharing comparator-arm data gleaned from completed cancer clinical trials. He already had the attention of pharmaceutical company CEOs through his involvement in Transcelerate, but what really got the process moving were connections he made with tech company executives involved in the CEO Roundtable on Cancer, a nonprofit organization that George H. W. Bush started to address issues facing cancer research. Hugh-Jones spent several months hashing through technical and proprietary issues that have hampered efforts to share data. He developed Project Data Sphere, which within weeks will go live with cancer trial data from an expected five to seven pharmaceutical companies. The goal, according to Hugh-Jones, is to have Project Data Sphere grow into an interactive platform where investigators can learn from the collective successes and failures of previous trials with the help of powerful analytic tools, which the statistical software giant SAS Institute offered to the project free. " The reality is that we have to do better , " said Hugh-Jones. " You've got to get beyond a 5% success rate in bringing new oncology drugs to market. But it's an economic issue as well. People are realizing there just isn't the money to keep pumping into trials either at a commercial or at a governmental level. " To kick-start the effort, Hugh-Jones persuaded his Sanofi colleagues to contribute the comparator-arm data from three completed trials: the phase III trial for …