Cancer Commons: Biomedicine in the Internet Age

Abstract

Despite the enormous strides medicine has made in the understanding and treatment of human disease, millions of people each year succumb to cancer. This chapter describes Cancer Commons, an approach to the treatment of cancer that echoes the eloquent words of Alexander Dumas in his 1844 masterpiece, The Three Musketeers: Un pour tous, tous pour un ( “ One for all, all for one ” ). The central idea that drives Cancer Commons is that biomedicine is essentially a huge ongoing experiment and the data resulting from every patient encounter should contribute as effi ciently as possible to improved treatment for each subsequent patient. In theory, to make this work, one need only treat each patient based upon the best available knowledge, gather all possible data from every such encounter, combine and analyze all of the data instantaneously, update the knowledge base accordingly, and then disseminate the updated knowledge base to inform treatment decisions for every subsequent patient encounter. Although diffi cult in practice, Cancer Commons is bringing this vision to reality through Internet technologies and advanced laboratory and computational techniques for dissecting cancer at the molecular level.