Collaborative Partnership between the Stuart and Molly Sloan Precision Oncology Institute, Office of Translational Research, and Data Science Lab
The Precision Oncology (PO), Office of Translational Research (OTR), and Data Science Lab (DaSL) teams are working together to magnify our collective powers to speed forward critical science and improve patient care. Our partnership evokes many of the values central to Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center including collaboration, determination, and respect. We strive to work towards the strategic priorities of Fred Hutch by enhancing scientific discovery and research across prevention, screening, translational, and data-driven research approaches.
Together, we are tackling several inter-related initiatives in response to the needs of our community: Universal/Broad Research Consent; Clinical Data Access and Abstraction; Specimen Access. As we begin this work, we’re embarking on a listening tour. Over the coming months, we’ll be hosting disease site-specific focus group discussions to learn, and document needs across these three initiatives. Attendees at these sessions will be interdisciplinary and span the translational research spectrum. We encourage anyone who is interested to sign up and attend. In addition, we will make summaries of what we learned in each session available to the community for further comment in case there are interested people who cannot attend.
Focus Group Discussion Details
Timeline for discussions: October 2023 to March 2024
Proposed Meeting Structure: Two-hour meeting facilitated by OTR, PO and DaSL teams. We will discuss each initiative and solicit feedback and needs from attendees.
Format: Meetings are organized by STTR disease groups and Consortium Research Programs, please contact us to learn more about the meeting schedule (STTRCancer@fredhutch.org).
Attendance: We encourage all researchers, faculty and staff with an interest in these key topics to attend the meetings. Interested attendees do not need to be affiliated with a specific STTR group and are welcome to attend any/all meetings. Please sign up here - meetings are regularly added to the calendar, please check back often for newly scheduled times.
Proposed Meeting Agenda
Universal/Broad Research Consent – Essential to Precision Oncology is a partnership with our patients to create equitable opportunities for involvement in research while protecting their privacy and health data. To accelerate our ability to bring precision therapies to the clinic, our goal is for patients at Fred Hutch and UW Medicine to have the opportunity to consent to research use of their data and biospecimens through a clear, accessible and comprehensive research consent process.
Specimen Access – OTR’s Specimen and Data Acquisition Network supports the needs of the translational research community at Fred Hutch and within the consortium institutions for biospecimens for research. We are interested in learning what types of specimens and diseases are of particular interest across our community to inform our project outreach.
Clinical Data: Access and Abstraction – DaSL’s recently chartered Patient Data Program aims to develop the infrastructure, policies and support tools to democratize appropriate access to patient data to drive translational research and improve clinical care. In partnership with OTR’s Data Abstraction program, we aim to expand utilization and research on our patient population by enabling timely access to high quality data. We are looking to the community to help us prioritize what data types (EHR, genomics, etc.), from which patient populations and for what types of data use we should be facilitating access to.
Post-Discussion Actions: If you cannot attend, our teams will distribute notes for comments and feedback via a unique link per disease group which will be available following the meeting.
Our collaboration is new and evolving and we want to keep the community up to date on our progress. We will be sending a newsletter three times annually to update the clinical and research community on progress made across our joint initiatives, as well as spotlighting the ongoing, exciting projects at the individual team level. The first iteration of our newsletter will include a “Learn More About our Teams” section, detailing ongoing projects and initiatives. To contact any of us in the meantime, please see below:
Precision Oncology: precisiononcology@fredhutch.org
Centernet for Fred Hutch employees and affiliates: https://centernet.fredhutch.org/cn/u/precision-oncology.html
Office of Translational Research: STTRCancer@fredhutch.org
Centernet for Fred Hutch employees and affiliates: https://centernet.fredhutch.org/cn/u/sttr.html
Data Science Lab: data@fredhutch.org / https://hutchdatascience.org
Monday Morning Data Science Newsletter: https://fhdata.substack.com