TIBCO Spotfire Provides Dana-Farber Cancer Institute with Unprecedented Insight into Cancer Vaccine Clinical Trials
When Karen Maloney, business development manager of the Cancer Vaccine Center (CVC) at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, decided to investigate the competitive landscape of the cancer vaccine field, she looked to a strategic planning and marketing MBA class at Babson College in Wellesley, MA, for help with the research project. There she met Xiaohong Cao, whose bioinformatics background led to the decision to focus on clinical vaccine trials as representative of potential competition. This became Dana-Farber CVC’s first organized attempt to assess in-depth the cancer vaccine market.
Cao focused on the analysis of 645 clinical trials related to cancer vaccines. The data was extracted in XML from the ClinicalTrials.gov Web site and included categories such as “Summary of Purpose,” “Trial Sponsor,” “Phase of the Trial,” “Recruiting Status,” and “Location.” Additional statistics on cancer types, including incidence and survival rates, were retrieved from the National Cancer Institute Surveillance data.
Challenge and Solution
Although information from clinical vaccine trials is organized fairly well into categories and can be downloaded, there is great inconsistency and redundancy inherent in the data registry. To gain a good understanding of the landscape, both an overview and an in-depth analytic capability were required simultaneously. It would have been very difficult, not to mention incredibly time-consuming, to analyze information from the multiple data sources separately, in order to understand the relationships underlying the data or identify trends and patterns using spreadsheets. And to attempt to use a traditional business intelligence tool would have required significant IT resources. Cao proposed using the TIBCO Spotfire DXP (Spotfire) computational and visual analysis tool for data exploration and discovery.
Results
With the help of Cao and Spotfire software, DanaFarber’s CVC developed a first-of-its-kind analysis approach to rapidly extract complex data specifically for cancer vaccines from the major clinical trial repository. Summarization and visualization of these data represents a cost-effective means of making informed decisions about future cancer vaccine clinical trials. The findings are helping the CVC at Dana-Farber understand its competition and the diseases they are working on to help shape its strategy in the marketplace.
Spotfire software’s visual and computational analysis approach provides the CVC at Dana-Farber