Stand Up To Cancer announced a request for proposals under SU2C Catalyst, a program supporting clinical trials and translational research.

Funded in collaboration with Merck, the grants will support investigation of new uses of the company’s anti-PD-1 therapy, Keytruda (pembrolizumab), alone or in combination with other agents from Merck or other companies.

Proposals for the Merck project grants must be submitted to the American Association for Cancer Research, SU2C’s scientific partner, by July 20. The RFP and complete details are available at Proposal Central. AACR will administer the program.

Merck support for SU2C Catalyst is expected to enable as many as four projects with funding in the range of $1 million to $3 million each.

Keytruda is indicated in the U.S. for the treatment of patients with unresectable or metastatic melanoma; and for non-small cell lung cancer tumors expressing PD-L1, with disease progression on or after platinum-containing chemotherapy.

The project must include pembrolizumab alone or in combination with other compounds, biologics, diagnostics, or devices intended as therapeutic interventions, and/or methods for biomarker identification for any cancer. The project is not limited to Merck products, however. If a product is proposed for use that is marketed or is under development by another company, SU2C plans to facilitate the necessary collaborative agreements.

THE NCI SURGERY BRANCH resumed enrollment of patients in clinical protocols evaluating immunotherapy as a treatment for patients with metastatic cancer.

By Matthew Bin Han Ong

Three health systems—Stanford Cancer Institute, Intermountain Healthcare and Providence Health and Services—have agreed to eliminate the electronic barriers between their medical records, tumor registries and genomics databases.

The three entities said they have started to use a common IT platform to achieve interoperability and guide clinical decision-making.

That platform is Syapse, a startup that is emerging as an important player in the ongoing conversation on bioinformatics and data sharing in oncology, led by Vice President Joe Biden and the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative.

The Moonshot’s Metric for Success: Avoiding a Single, Tangible Endpoint

By Conor Hale

How will the success of the moonshot be measured? NCI Acting Director Doug Lowy touched on the subject during the joint meeting of the institute’s Board of Scientific Advisors and the National Cancer Advisory Board June 21.

The moonshots of the 1960s were essentially engineering problems that had tangible goals. Cancer is an evolutionary problem, and the stated goal of the moonshot in cancer research, led by Vice President Joe Biden, is perhaps deliberately vague: to achieve a decade’s worth of progress in just five years.

Jonathan Hirsch was studying neuroscience at Stanford University when he wandered into two oncology classes and saw an opportunity to change the way health systems handle genomic data.

“I started getting really immersed in molecular oncology, and the challenges in implementing molecularly guided treatment started coming together with the challenges in utilizing complex data,” Hirsch said to The Cancer Letter.

“During one of my Stanford classes, I said, ‘I think that there is a company to be built here,’ and I dropped out of grad school and started Syapse.”

The contract for operations and technical support at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research could be accepting proposals as early as next month—but NCI advisors said they are hoping to slow the recompetition process to reform the laboratory’s mission.

By Paul Goldberg

The final version of guidelines for colorectal cancer screening by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force differ substantively from the group’s draft version published last October.

The final version—unlike the draft—lists CT colonography and FIT-DNA as screening methods that are equal to others.

Guideline Edits Rooted in Science, Former USPSTF Member Says

“I don’t see this recommendation as differing in any substantial way from some others that we’ve made, where we suggested that patients talk with their clinicians, and the important messages here is that colorectal cancer screening works, that colorectal cancer screening reduces deaths from colorectal cancer,” said Douglas Owens, a who has rotated off the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, and was involved in developing the colorectal cancer screening guideline published earlier this week.