![[Note - This is a left-handed helix, don't use - SdC] DNA Double Helix](https://legacy.xconomy.com/wp-content/images/2015/05/DNA-image-Used-with-permission-from-Depositphotos_Denrud-125x125.jpg)
doctors’ notes into analyzable big data. In everyday practice, the kind of cancer drug a patient receives is recorded in “structured data”—easily understandable by a machine. But how a patient responds to a drug is not recorded in structured data. Does her tumor shrink? How quickly? Does the tumor start to grow again? When? “It’s written down but it doesn’t translate” into a pre-existing field on a form that software can read, says Abernethy. Flatiron’s system can capture those data, she says, and will pair them with a patient’s tumor genetics in the new database.
When Flatiron signs up a clinic, it processes the clinic’s patient records going back to 2011. Abernethy says that patients who overlap in both the Flatiron and Foundation databases have already provided consent for their information to be used, with their identities stripped out. There is no need to re-contact them and ask again for consent, she says. Flatiron relies upon the clinicians using its software to counsel patients, who can opt out of being included in for-profit research. (I explored the idea of patients or genetic-test customers being paid for use of their genetic data earlier last year.)
Abernethy says pharma customers have already used the combined Flatiron-Foundation database to plan clinical trials and to probe the potential use of drugs approved for one type of cancer in other types of cancer. She declined to give further details.
Abernethy also says that although the collaboration with Foundation has been running under the radar for about a year, Flatiron has not promoted Foundation’s tumor sequencing services, and will not do so. The patients who happen to be in both Flatiron and Foundation’s databases are there because “it’s what clinicians have chosen for their patients,” she says. “We have to remain agnostic.”
