ASCO’s CancerLinQ^® announced that it has launched a new platform for CancerLinQ Discovery^®, its de-identified real-world cancer data product for researchers across the cancer community. The platform offers researchers an easy-to-use self-service offering of real-world cancer care data available for analysis, along with a streamlined data request process and a personalized Amazon Web Services (AWS) Workspace analytics environment.

Through CancerLinQ Discovery, researchers can examine curated sets of aggregated, de-identified data on a variety of cancer types, drawn from one of the largest and most diverse data sets in oncology. With 1.5 million patient records and growing, the CancerLinQ Discovery data set can be studied to uncover unseen patterns in patient characteristics and outcomes, with the goal of revealing opportunities to improve the quality of care.

“CancerLinQ is driven by the vision of learning from every patient with cancer, not only the 3% who participate in clinical trials,” said CancerLinQ CEO Cory Wiegert. “With this new platform, we’re a big step closer to making that a reality. Using CancerLinQ Discovery, researchers can more easily access the collective experiences of patients and oncologists across the country, gaining from an unmatched pool of real-world information and potential insights.”

The new CancerLinQ Discovery Research Platform enables researchers to:

• Access a user-friendly view of available CancerLinQ Discovery data sets. At launch, CancerLinQ is offering data for five disease areas: breast, lung, ovarian, and prostate cancers, as well as chronic lymphocytic leukemia/small lymphocytic lymphoma, with plans to launch several more data sets over the course of the year.
• Review key summary statistics about each data set prior to requesting access.
• Complete streamlined data request, approval, and access processes.
• Access a secure AWS workspace for completing analytic work, leveraging scalable cloud computing resources and tools like Apache Spark, RStudio, and Jupyter Notebooks, with additional tools and upgraded computing resources available upon request.

CancerLinQ Discovery is already being used by major cancer centers, government agencies, and other institutions to inform patient care and generate new hypotheses for clinical research.

This year, 11 abstracts completed using CancerLinQ Discovery data have been accepted to the ASCO20 Virtual Scientific Program. The new platform aims to accelerate this research and make CancerLinQ’s insights more easily accessible to the entire oncology research community.

“Working with the CancerLinQ Discovery data and unlocking its potential is incredibly exciting,” said Gabrielle Rocque, MD, of O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which has been using CancerLinQ Discovery since 2018. “We have a unique opportunity with this novel data source to ask questions that we’ve never been able to ask before.”

In addition, ASCO and CancerLinQ staff are using CancerLinQ Discovery to develop and publish a range of analyses that benefit the broader cancer community. For example, CancerLinQ is currently capturing data on COVID-19 infection directly from CancerLinQ-participating practices and, through CancerLinQ Discovery, will be providing de-identified data and analyses to help inform the cancer community’s ongoing response to the pandemic.

CancerLinQ Discovery is available for academic, nonprofit, government, and CancerLinQ subscriber researchers. Learn more about requesting access to CancerLinQ Discovery data.