Life as a Health Data Scientist

Modified from Thomas Wilckens, MD Many of us who work at the interface of cancer clinical research and biomedical informatics were thrilled to hear about the cancer moonshot program from President Obama, announced in his final State of the Union Address on Tuesday, Jan 12, 2016. VP Biden, the nominated leader for this effort, has pledged to increase the resources available to combat the disease, and to find ways for the cancer community to work together and share information, the operative word being “share” (after ‘resources’). In this post, I briefly review four thematic areas where informatics is already playing a key role to help realize cancer moonshot goals and identify challenges and opportunities. Immunotherapies: Recent approvals of ipilimumab (Yervoy), sipuleucel-T (Provenge), Nivolmab (Opdivo) and Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) represent important clinical advances for the field of active immunotherapy in oncology and for patients. Immunoinformatics played a critica