Lilly partners with the National Cancer Institute to accelerate cancer research through new program under Cancer Moonshot initiative

New database provides access to oncology studies in an effort to speed medicines to patients.

"We are honored to be a part of this unique partnership," said Andrew Schade, a distinguished medical fellow in Lilly's clinical diagnostics laboratory. "Liquid biopsies are going to be critical in the future to both identify specific patients for targeted therapies and to follow their treatment to better determine response to therapy. We hope knowledge gained from our research efforts in this area will help to accelerate the development of safe and effective blood profiling diagnostic technologies that help people with cancer."

In support of this overarching mission, Lilly is studying approaches for the profiling of exosomes for mRNA and non-coding RNA expression and will share sample preparation methods, next-generation quantitative PCR-based methods, and next generation sequencing-based methods along with data related to disease characterization through gene expression analysis.

"Our scientists are dedicated to discovering and developing new cancer treatments to help people living with this disease," said Jan Lundberg, executive vice president of science and technology and president of Lilly Research Laboratories. "In addition to our own research, external partnerships are paramount, and we look forward to collaborating with other experts as part of the Cancer Moonshot initiative."

The Blood Profiling Atlas is part of the Cancer Moonshot initiative, which was established to improve the way research is conducted and expedite the delivery of medicines to patients. Allowing approved researchers access to raw unprocessed datasets in a scalable and reproducible manner, the open database will feature the following data: raw data sets from circulating tumour cells, circulating tumour DNA, and exosome assays, as well as relevant clinical data, sample preparation, and handling protocols from 12 different studies. The Blood Profiling Atlas pilot will be curated by a partnership between the University of Chicago and Seven Bridges, a biomedical data analysis company.