Cancer Commons Aims to Crowdsource Medical Treatment

A California-based company is attempting to introduce expert crowdsourcing to oncology to try and ensure that each cancer patient gets the most appropriate treatment.

Cancer Commons brings together leading physicians and scientists in each type of cancer to create an open-source wiki-style database that will catalogue the different genomic subtypes of each disease and show how patients are responding to different treatments.

The project is based on the hypothesis that every patient's tumour is, to some extent, unique. Although most cancer drugs are tested individually in large-scale clinical trials, the majority of physicians (70 percent) prescribe cocktails of drugs based on their individual experience and particular genomic subtype of the cancer. By capturing, aggregating and analysing the genomic and results data of these individual drug experiments -- cross referencing them with the large scale clinical trials and studies -- physicians might be able to more efficiently find the most appropriate treatment for their patients.