March 9, 2017 — The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) Biomarkers Consortium is launching a three-year research partnership to develop new methods for analyzing digital images, which will lead to new ways to track a patient’s response to cancer therapy. The FNIH raised $2.7 million from the private sector to support the new project called “Advanced metrics and modeling with Volumetric CT for Precision Analysis of Clinical Trial results” (Vol-PACT). This project is the first to use imaging data from multiple completed, pharmaceutical industry-sponsored, phase II/III clinical trials to identify drug response measures.

The Vol-PACT project team will analyze the imaging data to measure characteristics of cancer progression and to generate potential biological markers (biomarkers). Since the project has access to multiple completed datasets, the team can rapidly develop robust imaging biomarker criteria and verify their utility in different settings. The project will compare the new imaging biomarkers to the current standards used for therapies that target specific genes and proteins, as well as those that stimulate immune response. This work has the potential to improve the accuracy and efficiency of future clinical trials across multiple treatments and cancer types, to accelerate cancer therapeutic development and allow physicians to better treat cancer patients.

The project team includes experts from the National Cancer Institute and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and will be led by Principal Investigators Lawrence H. Schwartz, M.D., Columbia University and Geoffrey Oxnard, M.D., Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, as well as Co-Investigators Mithat Gonen, Ph.D., Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Michael Maitland, M.D., Ph.D., Inova Center for Personalized Health and Schar Cancer Institute. To date, four companies have donated imaging and clinical trial data to support Vol-PACT.

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