New Cancer Drugs: Slashing Research From 6 Years To 1

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — For cancer patients and their loved ones seeking a new treatment or cure, this should offer hope - a consortium was announced Friday that aims to reduce the discovery process for new drugs from six years to one.

The consortium "launched an unprecedented effort to transform the way cancer drugs are discovered by creating an open and sharable platform that integrates high-performance computing, shared biological data from public and industry sources, and emerging biotechnologies to dramatically accelerate the discovery of effective cancer therapies," the University of California, San Francisco said in a statement.

The consortium is called Accelerating Therapeutics for Opportunities in Medicine (ATOM). It brings together experts in drug discovery at UCSF, experts in supercomputing at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, experts in chemical and biological data at GlaxoSmithKline and experts in medicine at the National Cancer Institute’s Frederick National Lab for Cancer Research (FNLCR).

“The goals of ATOM are tightly aligned with those of the 21st Century Cures Act, which aims in part to enable a greater number of therapies to reach more patients more quickly,” said FNLCR Laboratory Director David Heimbrook. “Although initially focused on precision oncology – treatments targeted specifically to the characteristics of the individual patient’s cancer – the consortium’s discoveries could accelerate drug discovery against many diseases.”

Once perfected, ATOM plans to share its multidisciplinary approach to drug discovery with the drug development community at large.

“ATOM is a novel public-private partnership that draws on the lab’s unique capabilities to create a paradigm change in drug development,” said LLNL Director Bill Goldstein. “It will help to strengthen U.S. leadership in high-performance computing, and, by speeding the discovery of therapeutics, contribute to biosecurity.”

“As we have learned more about what modern supercomputers can do, we’ve gained confidence that this approach can make a big difference in creating medicines,” said John Baldoni, Senior Vice President R&D at GSK. “We must do all that we can to reduce the time it takes to get medicines to patients. GSK is working to set a precedent with pharmaceutical companies by sharing data on failed compounds.”

The consortium will be headquartered at UCSF's Mission Bay campus in San Francisco.

“We at UCSF are eager to lend our expertise to this effort,” said UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood. “UCSF scientists and clinicians have long been leaders in drug discovery, therapeutics, and cancer biology with the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Care Center among the top-ranked cancer institutes in the country. Our role with ATOM is therefore in lock step with UCSF’s mission of advancing health worldwide.”

ATOM plans to welcome additional public and private partners who share the vision of the consortium.

-Image via Pixabay

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