MD Anderson, Oncora Medical team up to fight cancer with precision medicine alliance

Collaborative team will combine tools for collection and prediction of oncology outcomes to enable precision radiation oncology

MD Anderson News Release April 04, 2017

Oncora Medical, a precision radiation oncology software company, and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, today announced a strategic alliance focusing on building the next generation of precision medicine software for radiation oncology.

During Phase I, MD Anderson oncologists and information technology professionals will work with Oncora’s team of data scientists and engineers to install Oncora’s Precision Radiation Oncology Platform, a software system built to assist radiation oncologists in the development of personalized treatment plans based on outcome predictions. Oncora’s platform will be fueled by data from MD Anderson’s electronic medical record system, tumor registry, radiation therapy planning system, and Brocade, an innovative software product developed by MD Anderson in 2014. Brocade was developed by Benjamin Smith, M.D., associate professor of Radiation Oncology, and author of a study published in the April 2016 issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology that demonstrated a 70 percent reduction in the time physicians spend documenting clinical data using Brocade.

Brocade, a web-based clinical documentation tool used by MD Anderson radiation oncologists, enables intuitive collection of structured data about patient diagnosis, treatment and radiation side effects, and generates narrative-style clinical documentation for medical records. 

Oncora will engineer complete interoperability between their Precision Radiation Oncology Platform and Brocade to explore the potential value of a combined product.

“This partnership provides an opportunity for precision medicine to truly improve the way cancer treatments are designed and delivered,” said Oncora Medical co-founder and CEO, David Lindsay. “We’re excited to work with MD Anderson in an effort to improve care for patients.”

Precision medicine – delivering the best treatment to the right patient at the optimal time – could improve cancer survival rates while minimizing unintended side effects. Tools for collecting quality clinical data and predicting specific radiation treatment outcomes are necessary to make precision medicine a reality.

“We believe this partnership could be a significant step forward for the field of radiation oncology and our patients,” said Smith. “Through this alliance, we hope to improve workflows and processes for radiation oncologists and simultaneously give radiation oncologists access to better information to support real-time, precision medical decision making.”