US President Obama’s cancer project collaborates with the Oslo Cancer Cluster in order to find breakthroughs in cancer prevention and treatment.
Last week, Oslo Cancer Cluster’s CEO Ketil Widerbrg together with Jason Paragas from the Lawrence Livermore Research Laborator were interviewed by Norwegian Television about the role of cooperation and super-computers in finding better cancer prevention and treatment.
Oslo Cancer Cluster has entered a couple of important collaborations lately. For example, OCC recently entered into a collaboration with IBM where the goal is to combine the US tech giant’s intelligent super-computer Watson with Norwegian cancer databases.
Cancer Moonshot
The most recent collaboration concerns helping President Obama in his ambitious goal to fight cancer, according to the Norwegian Television station NRK. The base for this collaboration is the $1 billion Cancer Moonshot project, initiated by Obama and vice president Joseph Biden earlier this year. Their expert panel, the Blue Ribbon Panel highlighted 10 propositions to the National Cancer Advisory Board, and one of these was the building of a national ecosystem for cancer data and here’s where Oslo Cancer Cluster was asked to help. The cluster has entered into a collaboration with the Lawrence Livermore Research Laboratory in order to use the super-computer to analyze large amounts of data in short time and hopefully, find more effective cancer treatments.
“The goal is to instead of mass producing a pharmaceutical to the entire population, be able to “mass adjust” the treatment to the patient. The computer bases the medicine on the patient’s body type and type of cancer,” explains Jason Paragas, Director of Innovation at Lawrence Livermore Research Laboratory to NRK.
Oslo Cancer Cluster will contribute with research expertise and the unique Norwegian cancer registries will have a central role in the collaboration.
