To tackle the human health challenges that face the world today, the FNIH develops collaborations with top experts from government, industry, academia and the not-for-profit sector and provides a neutral environment where we can work productively toward a common goal.
The Partnership for Accelerating Cancer Therapies (PACT) is a five-year public-private research collaboration totaling $220 million launched by the National Institutes of Health, the FNIH and 12 leading pharmaceutical companies as part of the Cancer Moonshot. PACT will initially focus on efforts to identify, develop and validate robust biomarkers — standardized biological markers of disease and treatment response — to advance new immunotherapy treatments that harness the immune system to attack cancer. The partnership will be managed by the FNIH.
The ctDNA Quality Control Materials project seeks to develop a set of nationally recognized standards to enable the production of suitable quality control materials that can be submitted for FDA clearance for widespread use in ctDNA testing. Once successfully developed and disseminated, these quality control materials will provide confidence in interpretation of ctDNA biomarker assay results, paving the way for more effective clinical research, therapeutic decision-making, regulatory evaluation, and reimbursement applications.
Project results will help determine the effect of chemotherapy on malignant and non-malignant cells including immune cells. New biomarkers characterizing the TME before and after chemotherapy may be discovered that reflect cell composition, cell states, and cell-cell interaction.
The Cancer Steering Committee (CSC) Scientific Symposium reviews advances in the field of biomarker and regulatory science that are relevant to the development of new public-private partnerships for precompetitive biomarkers. This review assists the CSC with planning future public- private partnerships in this area.
Vol-PACT is designed to analyze volumetric CT imaging trial data from completed industry phase II/III solid tumor trials to improve quantitative prediction of phase III trial results. The project seeks to develop novel imaging methods to more accurately measure cancer response and progression
The project seeks to analyze volumetric CT imaging trial data from completed industry phase II solid tumor trials to improve quantitative prediction of phase III results.
Sarcopenia 2 seeks to establish evidence-based cut-points for muscle mass and strength and determine their predictive validity for clinically meaningful outcomes (such as mobility, fractures, hospitalization and death); evaluate relative strength as a discriminator for mobility limitation and incident disability; and explore the potential usefulness of sarcopenia as a clinical endpoint in randomized clinical trials.
The Sarcopenia 1 project launched in 2010 and aimed to establish the first evidence-based definition of sarcopenia (muscle weakness), which is still not recognized as a medical condition.
Minimal residual disease (MRD) is the amount of disease detected by molecular or cellular means when the patient is in a clinical and pathological state of remission after treatment of leukemia. The goals of this project are to assess whether MRD may be an endpoint for use as a DDT and to standardize MRD measurement in adult precursor B-lineage ALL.
Phase II trial of novel investigative breast cancer agents in the neoadjuvant setting that uses biomarkers and adaptive design to accelerate the clinical trial process.