The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has joined the community of scientists worldwide using Biomarker Center, a comprehensive resource for biomarker intelligence to provide pharmaceutical, biotechnology, diagnostic, and research organisations with a framework for assessing and tracking a potential biomarker for use at any stage of research or development.
Specifically, the National Cancer Institute's Developmental Therapeutics program and the associated Biomarker Program will integrate Biomarker Center into its continuing efforts to investigate novel chemical and biological agents for their potential to improve cancer therapeutics.
‘The NCI's Developmental Therapeutics Program (DTP) and its clinical counterpart, the Cancer Treatment Evaluation Program (CTEP) have been using Integrity and its predecessor, Ensemble, for many years as sources of current and earlier information on agents at all phases of discovery and clinical trials related to cancer,’ said Dave Newman, chief of the Natural Products Branch DCTD/DTP, NCI. ‘The availability of Biomarker Center and its integration with Integrity will now permit easier integration of animal and human biomarker information at all stages of the NCI's drug discovery and development programmes within the Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis, the parent organisation of DTP and CTEP.’
Using a unique lifecycle approach to indicate the stage of a given biomarker, Biomarker Center covers individual biomarker usage as identified in literature, patents, conferences, clinical trial information, and other sources for all major therapeutic areas. For each therapy area, it includes not only biomarkers with established clinical usage, but also emerging uses for the biomarker. Each record is manually curated and expertly indexed to allow searching by fields such as name, type, biological process, indication, population, role, measurement technique, substrate, lifecycle stage, and development status of diagnostic kits. Each record is further enriched with links to all supporting source documents, throughout the history of the biomarker.
