Precision Medicine News

Clinical Data, Precision Medicine to Target Improved Cancer Care

MedStar Health and COTA announced a research partnership that will use clinical data and precision medicine to provide better care for cancer patients.

Clinical data precision medicine

Source: Getty Images

By Erin McNemar, MPA

- With the goal of using real-world clinical data and precision medicine to deliver better care for cancer patients, MedStar Health and COTA announced a new research partnership.

Through the partnership, COTA will provide support to MedStar Health as the organization uses real-world data to accelerate scientific discovery and enhance care for cancer patients.

According to the press release, MedStar Health is the largest healthcare provider in the Maryland and Washington DC area. The provider’s cancer team includes the MedStar Health Cancer Network and the MedStar Georgetown Cancer Institute. The team assists patients with care across ten sites.

The institute’s academic cancer partner, Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, is one of only 51 cancer centers in the United States to receive this classification by the National Cancer Institute.  

"Our partnership with COTA will support our ongoing efforts to leverage deep clinical data to power research that will improve outcomes for cancer patients," Neil J. Weissman, MD, FACC, FASE, president of MedStar Health Research Institute and chief scientific officer for MedStar Health said in a press release. "As a leader in oncology real-world data, we are excited to work with COTA to drive innovative research that will change how cancer is studied and treated."

"Collecting and understanding data is becoming increasingly important to how we select cancer treatments for individuals," said Louis M. Weiner, MD, director of the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center and the MedStar Georgetown Cancer Institute. "The Institute's research collaboration with COTA will help accelerate advances and enhance our goal of providing our patients with tomorrow's cancer treatments, today."

COTA provides thorough oncology real-world data abstraction, curation, and analytic capabilities to healthcare provider organizations and life sciences companies working to develop treatments for patients living with a wide range of cancers.

By combining oncology expertise and technology-enabled data abstraction techniques, COTA works to develop curate meaningful, longitudinal, and de-identified datasets.

"At COTA we serve as a critical bridge between healthcare providers and the researchers who can accelerate clinical development to make life-saving treatments available to patients faster," said Mike Doyle, CEO of COTA. "We are proud to collaborate with MedStar Health, a well-respected leader in oncology, to advance scientific discovery with representative and diverse real-world data."

Through this partnership, MedStar Health and COTA will work to improve the quality of care received by cancer patients by accelerating scientific discovery and implementing the use of quality real-world data and precision medicine.