NIH Teams Up With Biopharma for Cancer Moonshot

A new Cancer Moonshot collaboration of NIH with 11 biopharmaceutical companies will undertake to identify and validate biomarkers to advance immunotherapies as its first order of business, the agency announced.

The research group, known as the Partnership for Accelerating Cancer Therapies, will spend $215 million over five years as part of the national effort to cure cancer that was launched by President Barack Obama in 2016.

Emerging immunotherapies have produced dramatic results in combating cancer, but they don’t work for everyone, NIH said. Development and standardization of biomarkers will shed light on how the therapies work and help predict patient responses to treatment, the agency said. That should aid in extending the treatments to more patients, it said.