APOLLO

Cancer research and care generate large volumes of complex data that could be used more effectively to diagnose the disease precisely, predict the patient’s prognosis and select the most effective therapy for a patient’s unique disease profile. To harness the power of this “big data,” a new environment is needed to promote cross-disciplinary collaboration among MD Anderson’s analytical labs, information systems, clinical care and research activities.

The APOLLO (Adaptive Patient-Oriented Longitudinal Learning and Optimization) program combines new and optimized existing workflows and infrastructure to create a more cohesive system for standardizing long-term collection of patients’ medical history and data derived from the patients’ biological samples. It’s coupled with research data and aggregated in a centralized big data warehouse for downstream analyses.

This adaptive learning environment relies on cutting-edge information and computer technologies to seamlessly blend patient data with knowledge from research studies plus best practices in clinical care to enable rapid and continuous patient-oriented learning. APOLLO allows clinicians to benefit from the latest research insights, apply it against the complex patient data and clinical knowledge to generate better informed treatment decisions or hypotheses for testing. The goal is to improve the effectiveness of our care today and advance the future care for our patients.