The CEO Roundtable on Cancer and its Life Sciences Consortium presented the inaugural Charles A. Sanders Life Sciences Awards to Hogan Lovells, Sanofi and SAS, in recognition of their innovative and collaborative work on Project Data Sphere.

“The work of these three organizations exemplify the ethos of Charlie Sanders and his belief that great innovation happens best through great collaboration,” said Dr. Herbert Boyer, founder of Genentech, who co-chaired the award selection committee along with Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann, chancellor of the University of California-San Francisco.

Created under the direction of the Life Sciences Consortium and led by the combined efforts of Hogan Lovells, Sanofi and SAS, Project Data Sphere is a collaborative effort of life sciences organizations, health advocacy groups, medical data standards organizations, contract research companies, universities, and technology vendors to create a shared, neutral data platform where historical clinical trials data can be made available to researchers for meta-analysis and secondary studies. 

Hogan Lovells, Sanofi and SAS, have contributed significant insight and expertise in order to make Project Data Sphere a reality, led by Ann Morgan Vickery, Christopher A. Viehbacher, and Dr. James A. Goodnight, respectively. Since being proposed by the member CEOs at the annual meeting of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer in 2012, the three organizations have played integral roles in creating the infrastructure to make large scale clinical trial data available. During the past year, their work on Project Data Sphere has been presented at the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) National Cancer Policy Forum workshop devoted to clinical research data and has been highlighted in Science and Cancer Discovery.

The three executives were presented with the Charles A. Sanders Award in honor of the former chairman and CEO of Glaxo, Inc. (now GlaxoSmithKline) and the immediate past chairman of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Sanders has been the force behind the development of many innovative pharmaceutical products and has helped to shape health education and medical research in the United States.  A renowned scientist, educator, philanthropist, medical doctor and administrator, Sanders, represents the tenets of leadership, innovation and collaboration that the Life Sciences Consortium encourages and catalyzes, as charged by the founder of the CEO Roundtable, President George H. W. Bush.