Intelligent Health.tech Issue 02 | Page 9

NEWS

MEDIDATA SUPPORTS WHITE HOUSE CANCER MOONSHOT WITH ITS PATIENT CLOUD TECHNOLOGIES

Medidata , a Dassault Systèmes company , is supporting the White House Cancer Moonshot initiative by working with the National Cancer Institute ( NCI ) to enrol patients in the Cancer Moonshot Biobank .

The Biobank is a project designed to better understand how cancer develops and grows and why some cancers stop responding to treatment . People with cancer are asked to donate tumour tissue , blood samples and health data to find discoveries that improve cancer treatments and increase survival .
Medidata , Theradex Oncology and NCI are helping enrol patients in the Biobank across more than 100 clinical sites in the US . This team works together to engage and educate study volunteers , accurately and securely collect patient information in the clinical trial and enrol patients in the project . The enrolment process includes clinical site staff providing orientation content and related HIPAA ( Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act privacy law ) documents to the patient for education and eSignature .
These activities are part of the White House Cancer Moonshot initiative , which has set a goal of reducing the cancer death rate by 50 % over the next 25 years and improving the experience of people and their families living with and surviving cancer .

NEW HIGH-TECH IMAGING REVEALS DETAILS ABOUT A RARE EYE DISORDER

Using a new imaging technique , researchers from the National Eye Institute ( NEI ), part of the National Institutes of Health , has determined that retinal lesions from vitelliform macular dystrophy ( VMD ) vary by a gene mutation . Addressing these differences may be key in designing effective treatments for these and other rare diseases .

VMD is an inherited genetic disease that causes progressive vision loss through degeneration of the light-sensing retina .
Genes implicated in VMD include BEST1 , PRPH2 , IMPG1 and IMPG2 . Depending on the gene and mutation , the age of onset and severity vary widely . VMD affects about one in 5,500 Americans and there is currently no treatment for this condition .
Johnny Tam , PhD , Head of the NEI Clinical and Translational Imaging Unit , used multimodal imaging to evaluate the retinas of patients with VMD at the NIH Clinical Centre . Tam ’ s imaging uses adaptive optics – a technique that employs deformable mirrors to improve resolution – to view live cells in the retina , including the light-sensing photoreceptors , retinal pigment epithelial ( RPE ) cells and blood vessels in unprecedented detail .
" The NEI ' s long-term investment in imaging technology is changing our understanding of eye diseases ," said Michael F . Chiang , M . D , Director , NEI .
" This study is just one example of how improved imaging can reveal subtle details about pathology in a rare eye disease that can inform the development of therapeutics ."
www . intelligenthealth . tech 9