Project Data Sphere, LLC (PDS) is an independent not-for-profit initiative of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer’s Life Sciences Consortium (LSC). The CEO Roundtable on Cancer has expanded the executive leadership of PDS to continue building on PDS’s first-year data collection successes and broaden the academic, government and industry collaborations that continue to drive the progress of this innovative research library-laboratory.
Currently, nearly 1,000 authorized users of the Project Data Sphere® platform can access 51 comparator arm data sets representing more than 27,000 patient lives across a broad array of cancer tumor areas. In order to ensure that researchers can realize the full potential of this data, PDS teamed with CEO Roundtable on Cancer Member SAS Institute Inc. (SAS), a leader in data and health analytics, which developed and hosts the platform and provides free state-of-the-art analytic tools to the platform’s authorized users.
Christopher A. Viehbacher, Chairman of Board of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer, has announced the appointment of Dr. Martin J. Murphy as PDS’s Chief Executive Officer, Kenneth B. Lee, Jr. as Treasurer and John N. Dornan, Jr. as Chief Operating Officer. Dr. Kald Abdallah, who most recently served as Chief Project Data Sphere Officer, has left the organization to pursue a new career opportunity.
“Already within its first year, the broad-access approach of the Project Data Sphere® platform has proven its innovation potential by aggregating and permitting analysis of a massive volume of data otherwise hidden in historical clinical trials,” said Robert A. Ingram, founding Chairman, and current Vice Chairman of the Board of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer. “We must now expand the number of clinical trials from both industry and academia, because these new data will hasten our ability to improve clinical trial design, enhance our understanding of cancer cell biology, and catalyze practice-changing discoveries.”
Through The Prostate Cancer DREAM Challenge, an effort launched in collaboration with Sage BioNetworks with the support of the Prostate Cancer Foundation, more than 50 teams comprised of more than 500 solvers in the cancer research and computational biology community worked to find solutions to key unanswered clinical research questions and explore innovative research and modeling approaches. In addition to working with Sage BioNetworks on an innovative crowdsourcing challenge, PDS has provided access, through the Project Data Sphere platform, to previously untapped data as well as powerful analytic software tools with which to interrogate it. The result has been an increasing number of research outcomes including several peer-reviewed papers published recently in The Oncologist and research abstracts published in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology earlier this year.
The achievement of these research milestones was made possible by organizations that provided data and catalyzed the use of the platform for research innovation. Charter data providers include AstraZeneca, Bayer, Celgene, Johnson & Johnson, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Pfizer and Sanofi. Most of these organizations also increased their level of data provision throughout the year. Additionally, the ranks of data providers grew to include other leading oncology research organizations such as Amgen, EMD Serono, Lilly, Synta and The Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology, one of the five U.S. network groups of the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN) Program.
PDS Chief Executive Officer, Martin J. Murphy, DMedSc, PhD, FASCO, is a member of PDS’s Executive Committee which also includes Victor Dzau, MD, President, National Academy of Medicine; Stephen Friend, MD, PhD, President, Co-Founder and Director, Sage Bionetworks; Dennis Gillings, PhD, Executive Chairman, Quintiles; Richard Goldberg, MD, Physician-in-Chief, James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute; Charles A. Sanders, MD, Executive Chairman, Foundation for the National Institute of Health; and Elias Zerhouni, MD, President, Global R&D, Sanofi.
Murphy is the founding and current Chief Executive Officer of the non-profit CEO Roundtable on Cancer, Inc., founded at the request of forty-first President, George H.W. Bush. Murphy is also founding Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of AlphaMed Consulting, Inc. and founding Executive Editor of the peerreviewed journal, The Oncologist. The founder and former Chief Executive Officer of the Hipple Cancer Research Center, Murphy is also a member of the National Cancer Policy Forum of the Institute of Medicine and a director of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health. Murphy is Chairman Emeritus of the Conquer Cancer Foundation of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), convener of ACT-China (Advanced Clinical Trials-China) and a steering committee member and senior consultant of the Chinese Society of Clinical Oncology. Murphy is a charter member and Vice Chairman of C-Change, also founded at the request of former President George H. W. Bush and former First Lady Barbara Bush. In 2014, Murphy accepted the 2014 Project HOPE Global Health Impact Award on behalf of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer recognizing its ongoing, global, workplace health and wellness efforts as well as the organization’s leadership in the much-needed area of sharing critical clinical trial data in oncology.
Lee is a general partner of Hatteras Venture Partners and plays a key role in deal sourcing, investment decisions, management recruitment and evaluation and implementing exit strategies. Lee is the former co-head of International Life Sciences for Ernst & Young, where he established a career over 29 years advising biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies throughout the world. He got his start in biotech as part of the first audit team of Genentech in 1976. As co-founder and manager of Ernst & Young’s national life sciences practice from his location in the San Francisco Bay Area, he advised numerous high profile life science companies with their initial public offerings, mergers and acquisitions, and strategic financings. Among others, these included Affymax, Affymetrix, Applied ImmuneSciences, Chiron, Circadian, Genentech, Heartport, Systemix, ALZA and Collagen.
Dornan is the Executive Director of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer, Inc., overseeing the group’s initiatives including the CEO Cancer Gold Standard workplace accreditation program that recognizes employers who provide state-of-the-art preventive care, wellness support and cancer treatment; and the Life Sciences Consortium, whose efforts to encourage researchers to work collaboratively to accelerate the discovery and development of new therapies for cancer patients resulted in the formation of Project Data Sphere, LLC. He is a former Vice President of Trone, a mid-Atlantic regional advertising and public relations agency. He previously headed corporate public relations for SAS and held marketing and communications positions with Healthsource North Carolina prior to its acquisition by CIGNA. He began his career in North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services where he provided outreach and communications services for the state’s welfare reform efforts and programs for children and families including the nationally renowned Smart Start early childhood initiative created by Gov. James B. Hunt.
About Project Data Sphere, LLC
Project Data Sphere, LLC (PDS), an independent, not-for-profit initiative of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer’s Life Sciences Consortium (LSC), operates the Project Data Sphere platform (www.ProjectDataSphere.org) which provides one place where the research community can broadly \NORTHVA – 090334/000052 – 673112 v1 share, integrate and analyze historical, patient-level cancer phase III comparator-arm data with the goal of advancing future research to improve the lives of cancer patients and their families around the world.