The Journal of mHealth Vol 2 issue 5 (Oct) | Page 10

Industry News
Continued from page 7

and personal information to access the
products, services and interventions they
need. This assurance and increased usage
should allow app developers to be properly reimbursed so that they can continuously monitor and improve their apps to
ensure that they remain current.
What PAS 277 does:
»» Gives recommendations for quality criteria of health and wellness
apps, intended to meet the needs of
healthcare professionals, patients,
carers and the wider public.
»» Covers the full app project life cycle,
including development, testing, releasing and updating of an app, including
clinical, native, hybrid and web-based
apps. It addresses fitness for purpose

and the monitoring of usage.
»» Informs the development of health
and wellness apps intended for internal use, within organisations, as well
as those that are placed in the market.
PAS 277 does not cover the process or
criteria used to establish whether a health
and wellness app is subject to regulatory
control (e.g. such as a medical device, or
related to information governance).
Anne Hayes Head of Market Development for Governance at BSI said:
“There is huge scope for advancement
in the area of wellness innovation, and
we are thrilled to be pioneering work in
the healthcare arena. It is therefore also
our responsibility to safeguard the consumer and healthcare professional by
governing the apps that are developed

in the future. We can only do that by
arming app developers with guidance
such as PAS 277.”
PAS 277 will be of use to app developers
and publishers, health care professionals and general users of mobile apps;
and was developed using a consensusbased approach involving experts from
across the industry. Some of the organisations involved include: Association of
British Healthcare Industries (ABHI),
BT, BUPA, Caton Bell Limited, Digital
Health & Care Alliance, Health & Social
Care Information Centre (HSCIC),
INPUT Patient Advocacy, INPS, NHS
England, NIHR Mindtech Healthcare Technology Cooperative, Omron
Healthcare, Royal College of Physicians
and South West Academic Health Science Network (SWAHSN). n

UCSF Receives $5 million Grant
to Create Online Database on all
Types of Cancer
UC San Francisco has received a National Cancer Institute grant
of $5 million over the next five years to lead a massive effort to
integrate the data from all experimental models across all types
of cancer. The web-based repository is an important step in
moving the fight against cancer toward precision medicine.
The goal is to accelerate cancer research to improve the way we
diagnose, treat and conduct further research on the disease. The
resulting database, called the Oncology Models Forum (OMF),
will be accessible to researchers through the National Institutes
of Health, to encourage scientists to use existing validated cancer models, rather than creating new ones.
"There are incredible new discoveries happening in cancer
research today, such as detecting cancer cells and DNA in the
blood stream, and even harnessing the immune system to fight
cancers," said Atul Butte, MD, PhD, director of the Institute for
Computational Health Sciences at UCSF and principal investigator for the grant. "These research methodologies generate
enormous amounts of data that can and should be harnessed by
researchers and engineers to yield new drugs and diagnostics."

8

Cell lines and mice have been placeholders for studying human
cancer for decades, resulting in thousands of mouse models for
all cancer types. While results from those studies are chronicled
in scientific papers and journals, it is difficult to know how relevant the data from these experimental systems are to the actual
research and development of drugs and diagnostics in

October 2015

actual human cancers.
This is particularly important, Butte said, because there can be
a gap of up to 10 years between the early basic science discoveries from experimental systems and the actual clinical trial of
the drug candidates that are developed from that science, with
many drug candidates failing in those clinical trials. As a result,
it is critically important to ensure that early scientific discoveries
are in fact relevant to human cancers, to provide every possible
hope that the eventual drugs developed from those discoveries
will work in clinical trials and be available to cancer patients.