Providing researchers with access to real-world cancer patient data has the potential to improve care and impact quality of life for cardio-oncology patients everywhere. To accomplish this, two science-based organizations, CancerLinQ LLC, a nonprofit subsidiary of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), and the American Heart Association, the leading voluntary health organization devoted to a world of longer, healthier lives, are teaming up to make oncology datasets from the CancerLinQ Discovery® database available to academic researchers, non-profits, health care providers and government agencies through a customized version of the American Heart Association’s Precision Medicine Platform.

“We have a growing amount of deidentified cancer patient data that can improve our understanding of cancer through peer-reviewed research,” said CancerLinQ LLC, CEO Cory Wiegert. “This collaboration with the American Heart Association will give more researchers the opportunity to conduct studies that can explore patterns in care and outcomes in patient populations not participating in clinical trials.”

The intersection of CancerLinQ and the Association’s Precision Medicine Platform represents two non-profit organizations in different therapeutic areas coming together to leverage technology that will enable researchers to access information to accelerate scientific discoveries and improve patient outcomes.

"Collaborating and working across health care disciplines are critical in providing breakthroughs and solutions for all diseases, said Jennifer Hall, Ph.D., FAHA, Chief, Institute for Precision Cardiovascular Medicine. “Our collaboration includes licensing the American Heart Association’s Precision Medicine Platform technology to ASCO, giving CancerLinQ Discovery the ability to scale to support an increasing volume of research projects that improve outcomes for patients.”

The customized CancerLinQ® platform will be able to organize and analyze deidentified cancer care data from the CancerLinQ Discovery database in order to help improve health care operations and the quality of care. Combining the state-of-the-art capabilities of the platform with this body of evidence offers a unique opportunity to study data on patient care that was previously unavailable due to medical records locked away in file cabinets or on unconnected servers.  Researchers now have the potential to learn from every patient, as compared to the highly selective and small subset of patients who participate in conventional, prospective clinical trials.

The American Heart Association’s Precision Medicine Platform is a cloud-based, data science environment purpose-built for medical research in today’s world of big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Using flexible workspaces configurable on demand and cutting-edge research tools, it offers organizations the efficiencies they need to drive scientific advancement.

Through CancerLinQ Discovery®, researchers have the ability to access CancerLinQ’s growing database via a library of structured, harmonized and deidentified oncologic, disease-type-defined datasets. With records on over one million cancer cases and growing, the CancerLinQ Discovery database is among the largest in oncology. CancerLinQ’s deidentified data reflects cancer care in all its real-world variability, making potential insights even more valuable.