New ways of collaborating move cancer research forward during COVID-19

It takes a team to make discoveries. But MD Anderson has taken this concept well beyond the traditional partnership between students, scientists and research support staff. 

“The COVID-19 pandemic required us to think differently about how we could keep our important research efforts going while ensuring the highest possible safety for our scientists, our colleagues who care for patients and the immunocompromised patients who continue to need us to treat their cancer,” says Giulio Draetta, M.D., Ph.D., MD Anderson’s chief scientific officer. “Every solution came from a team of decision makers and relied on a new level of collaboration to execute.” 

COVID-19 yields unprecedented teamwork in the lab

In the early stage of the pandemic, leaders made the incredibly difficult decision to temporarily suspend laboratory research. When it was determined safe to do so, research labs began to slowly ramp up. At first, this involved working in shifts to reduce the number of people in buildings and to keep the research teams in cohorts to keep the research going if one shift had to be  quarantined.

“Some experiments take many hours to complete and our researchers had to start them during one shift and have the next shift complete them,” says Philip Jones, Ph.D., vice president for Therapeutics Discovery and leader for COVID-19 response related to research activities. “A lab team is already a tight-knit group, but this took collaboration to a whole new level. The teams all stepped up and worked creatively and more closely than ever before to keep the research moving forward.”

Cancer clinical trials benefit from collaboration, creativity during COVID-19

New levels of collaboration also kept life-saving clinical trials available to our patients.

“We had to ensure our patients on experimental therapies continued to receive their medications and see the providers they needed despite the pandemic,” says Jennifer Litton, M.D., vice president for Clinical Research.

Our Investigational Pharmacy Services department not only mailed medication to patients on clinical trials; they also sent notes to each one assuring them that they would receive the medications they depend upon. And when travel was restricted, MD Anderson’s clinical researchers ensured patients could get the care they needed. We collaborated at new levels with MD Anderson Cancer Network® partner institutions across the country to enable clinical trial patients who live in different states to get their treatments and tests at an MD Anderson partner institution closer to home. Clinical researchers also used virtual visits to ensure patients could remain on clinical trials.

After flying to Houston from Chicago every month to get her clinical trial drug and see her care team, lung cancer survivor Alexa DiVenere began having monthly virtual visits in March with clinical trial leader Vivek Subbiah, M.D., and getting the medications mailed to her. “It's been really amazing to get the life-saving medicine that I need even if I'm not going to MD Anderson physically at this point in time,” Alexa says. 

Subbiah agrees, noting how the pandemic has created a major shift in the way clinical trials are conducted. 

“The pandemic has opened new doors for clinical trials by reducing or eliminating the need for patients to travel to trial sites,” he explains.

Because of the leading-edge treatments offered at MD Anderson, many of our clinical trial participants have had to travel – sometimes from long distances – and miss work, make hotel reservations and spend hours in clinics to participate in person. All of which have been barriers to joining clinical trials, Subbiah says. Virtual visits and the ability of new technology to capture data from patient-worn-devices are making trials more convenient for patients and lessening the enrollment barrier. 

“This is a major shift toward trials becoming more patient-centric, and it is a welcomed and necessary shift that is likely to become the norm for future clinical trials,” Subbiah says.

Harnessing the power of data to end cancer

Our people are MD Anderson's most valuable asset. After that, some might argue our data is our next most valuable asset. This past year, we made great strides to better harness the power of our data through several collaborations.

One collaboration is between three UT System institutions – MD Anderson, as well as The University of Texas at Austin's Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Together, they are supporting the development of teams that bring together MD Anderson's oncology expertise and data with novel mechanism-based computational modeling techniques led by researchers at the Oden Institute and TACC.

“Integrating and learning from the massive amount of largely unstructured data in cancer care and research is a formidable challenge,” says David Jaffray, Ph.D., chief technology and digital officer at MD Anderson. “The Oncological Data and Computational Sciences collaboration will bring together teams that can place quantitative data in context and inform state-of-the-art computational models of the disease to accelerate progress in our mission to end cancer.

D3CODE protocol enables researchers to study COVID-19 and cancer data

Other data science collaboration efforts were sparked in FY20 by a diverse team who quickly assembled to enable scientists to learn as much as possible about COVID-19 and cancer by collecting and aggregating data from many sources. The Data-Driven Determinants for COVID-19 Oncology Discovery (D3CODE) protocol allows researchers studying different aspects of these diseases to go to one resource to access data for their studies. More than 30 research projects have taken advantage of D3CODE since it launched in early 2020.

“It’s truly been remarkable how quickly so many diverse experts came together to make this happen,” says Genomics Medicine Chair Andrew Futreal, Ph.D., who co-leads D3CODE with Jaffray. “The focused effort and energy produced in one to two weeks what would typically take six months or more to accomplish.”

From D3CODE, other collaborations formed to establish structures and processes to better enable data to drive research beyond COVID-19 studies.

“Data is so powerful. We are building an infrastructure to enable scientists to benefit from each other’s data – ensuring it will be high quality, used in the proper context and credited appropriately. This data science ecosystem promises to greatly accelerate the rate and number of discoveries.”

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