April 27, 2011 at 04:00 PM | categories:
Conferences
I just attended the DARPA-NCI Cancer Prediction, Prognosis, and Prevention (CAP3) Workshop in Bethesda. The workshop brought together some outstanding cancer researchers and representatives of NCI and NIH with some mathematics and CS folks from the DARPA side to look for ways to collaborate on cancer diagnosis and treatment. An example is trying to predict patient response to a drug based on a heterogeneous dataset of biomarkers, sequence data, etc. Apparently, cancer has been shockingly resistant to translating biomarker studies that work as correlates or predictors in a research setting to something that works clinically. The analytics camp has been trying to come up with general-purpose tools, especially for predicting failure modes in complex systems (example), and the hope is that these might be brought to bear on such prediction tasks.