Sylvester Selected to Join AACR’s Worldwide Data-Sharing Registry

Pearl Seo, MD, MPH

AACR, the largest cancer research organization dedicated to accelerating the conquest of cancer, launched Project GENIE (Genomics Evidence Neoplasia Information Exchange) to overcome a major challenge to achieving precision medicine in cancer. The challenge is that no single cancer center can sequence and treat enough patients to gather the data needed to provide generalizable evidence to guide the care of individuals with particular cancer types.

Project GENIE is a publicly accessible cancer registry of real-world clinico-genomic data, assembled through data sharing among leading international cancer centers. Sylvester is among the four newest members of the collaborative.

Sylvester, which cares for richly diverse patient populations, stood out for contributing to Project GENIE’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.

“We are thrilled to join the AACR Project GENIE and hope to enhance patient diversity in the GENIE program,” said Pearl Seo, MD, MPH, assistant director of clinical research informatics and assistant director of the precision medicine program at Sylvester. “We are excited to advance clinical and translational research efforts by providing greater understanding of cancer in different patients.”

“Being part of AACR Project GENIE is a unique opportunity to bring together exemplary clinico-genomic data from diverse populations to enable impactful discoveries transcending race, ethnicity and geography,” said Vasileios Stathias, Ph.D., assistant director of data science at Sylvester.

Cancer Data Can Inform Predictive Models

Sylvester is generating a lot of data in research and patient care, and it is critically important to be able to use that data to develop predictive models, according to Stephan C. Schürer, PhD, associate director of data science at Sylvester.

The AACR GENIE consortium helps the cancer center to do just that by bringing together some of the world's leading cancer centers that meet AACR’s high standards for data quality, feasibility and value. Participating centers must also be able to contribute several hundred genomic records every year as part of Project GENIE.

“The addition of Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center is a significant step towards achieving our shared goal of improving cancer outcomes for patients worldwide,” said Dr. Schürer.

Sylvester joins an impressive roster of Project GENIE participating cancer centers, including Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Johns Hopkins, Stanford University, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, University of California, Netherlands Cancer Institute and University of Cambridge, among others.

Since 2015, Project GENIE has collected clinical and genomic data from more than 160,000 samples representing nearly 150,000 patients, 111 major cancers and 775 unique cancer subtypes.

Other members of the Sylvester Project GENIE team are precision medicine researchers Joanita Figueredo, PhD, and Samuel Phelps, PMP.