As part of its ongoing work with the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative, ASCO submitted recommendations on how the National Cancer Institute (NCI) can engage with the White House on this initiative. Earlier this year, the NCI launched an online platform for the biomedical community, patients, and the general public to share ideas to improve cancer research and double the pace of progress against cancer.

In a comment letter to the NCI Blue Ribbon Panel, a working group of the Presidentially appointed NCI National Cancer Advisory Board (NCAB), ASCO President Daniel F. Hayes, MD, FASCO, urged the panel to leverage innovative advances in technology that will provide game-changing platforms and alter the trajectory of cancer research, emphasizing the following three areas:

• Enhanced access to clinical outcomes databases, like ASCO’s CancerLinQ ™, to help learn from all patients with cancer throughout the cancer continuum.
• A sustained and well-funded national cancer research system and a clinical research infrastructure that brings trials to patients as they are identified at the point of care, the way ASCO’s Targeted Agent and Profiling Utilization Registry (TAPUR) study is designed to do.
• Use of digital technology and mobile devices to better incorporate patient-reported outcomes (PRO) tools into clinical trials and ensure that researchers collect outcomes that are meaningful to patient selection of therapy.

Additional ASCO recommendations addressed the following research needs:

• Population-wide implementation of evidence-based cancer prevention
• Clinical trial accrual and the representation of research participants
• Research to guide effective survivorship care
• PRO and additional types of toxicity assessments for measuring effectiveness and harms of cancer treatments
• Incorporating real-world evidence to enable learning from every patient with cancer XXBiomarker development and validation
• Determining effective ways to improve processes associated with conducting and managing clinical trials
• Dissemination and implementation research on cancer care delivery

ASCO’s comments follow Vice President Joe Biden’s address at the 2016 ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago. The Vice President thanked oncologists for their commitment to patient care and their contributions to the nation’s growing understanding of cancer, and called on them to provide bold new ideas that can advance the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative.

“Every year, thousands of oncologists and millions of patients all over the world await the news coming from this meeting—new breakthroughs, new therapies, new promises of cure, hope,” he said. “I know of no cadre of people in the world more desperately in need of hope than the 16 million people with cancer.”

ASCO continues to actively support the Vice President’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative and advocate for research and policy changes that will accelerate the development of groundbreaking clinical research and the most promising treatments in patient care. On June 29, ASCO CEO Clifford A. Hudis, MD, FASCO, and CancerLinQ LLC CEO Kevin Fitzpatrick represented ASCO at the Cancer Moonshot Summit, where they discussed the Society’s perspective on speeding the discovery of new cancer treatments, including issues related to enrollment in clinical trials, access to care, federal funding, enhanced data sharing, and information technology and interoperability.

To stay updated on ASCO’s participation in the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative, please visit ASCO Action.