ACR Seeks Partners for New ARPA-H Program to Revolutionize Cancer Treatment

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) recently announced the ADvanced Analysis for Precision cancer Therapy (ADAPT) program, intended to harness advanced technologies and a deep understanding of tumor biology to build cancer biomarkers. ARPA-H will seek proposals to revolutionize new adaptive strategies for treating the evolution of cancer. ADAPT program awardees will be tasked with developing groundbreaking new ways to revolutionize cancer care by bringing science and medicine together to map and target tumor changes that improve survival rates for patients with metastatic cancer.

The American College of Radiology® (ACR®) is interested in working with potential applicants. Interested applicants should contact Charlie Apgar, ACR Executive Vice President, Center for Research and Innovation, or Mike Tilkin, ACR Chief Information Officer and Executive Vice President.

ADAPT will create an adaptive cancer treatment platform that detects when tumors change, recommends updates to the treatment plan, and evaluates revised plans through a novel clinical trial design. This central hub will be instrumental for clinicians and researchers to access data and resources, providing evidence that may rapidly inform and shape clinical practice. This repository will house algorithms, protocols and evolving data on biomarkers and anti-cancer agents.

Proposals, due May 6, can be submitted to three clinical areas:

• Technical area 1 focuses on therapy recommendation techniques, including multi-modal data fusion, resistant trait modeling and development of biomarkers to predict drug response.
• Technical area 2 focuses on a new evolutionary clinical trial that treats patients during multiple therapy lines by discovering emergent resistant traits and therapy biomarkers developed in technical area 1.
• Technical area 3 unites researchers and clinicians through the creation of a cancer treatment and analysis platform to enable real-time data availability. The goal of the program is to accurately predict which patients will respond to which therapies, improving survival rates in people with metastatic cancers.

For more information about ACR collaborations with ARPA-H, contact Katie Grady, ACR Government Affairs Director.