On Oct. 12, 2017, The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and 11 biopharmaceutical companies recently announced the launch of the Partnership for Accelerating Cancer Therapies (PACT). The 5-year collaboration supports the Cancer Moonshot project and will provide $215 million to fund further efforts to develop cancer immunotherapies, according to a press release.

PACT will focus on efforts to identify, develop, and validate biomarkers that can be used to create immunotherapy treatments, according to the NIH.

Immunotherapies have proven to be a groundbreaking treatment for multiple types of cancer. Many biopharmaceutical companies have invested heavily into these drugs to provide better treatments for patients who do not respond to traditional treatments. However, immunotherapy is not always been effective for all patients. The identification of biomarkers that can lead to a better understanding of immunotherapy is necessary to understand how to make the drugs effective in more patients, according to the release.

Under the collaboration, research will also implement immune and related cancer biomarkers into novel clinical trials by standardizing biomarkers. This approach will lead to consistent data, uniform assays to support data reproducibility, comparability of data, and discovery of new biomarkers, the NIH reported.

The collaboration will also foster information sharing to ensure that clinical trials are coordinated, innovative, and high-quality.