Peter Johnson, a cofounder of Annai and a cofounder of Agouron Pharmaceuticals, has generously made a $30,000 contribution to Clearity as a matching gift. Through the remainder of November and throughout December, donations to Clearity will be matched dollar-for-dollar, up to $30,000 with this generous gift. Donations of $100 or more made before December 3rd will be recognized during Clearity's fundraising event on December 15. 

 

"I hope you'll join me in supporting Clearity's mission of bringing the promise of personalized medicine to patients today," said Mr. Johnson. "Genomic discoveries are being made at an accelerating pace, but are too slowly bringing help to the patients who courageously battle every day with the cancers that are most difficult to treat, like ovarian cancer. I'm gratified to be able to support individualized treatment options for women today through this gift to Clearity." Click here to donate to Clearity online.

Dear Clearity Foundation Supporters,

 

As we enter our 5th year of providing tumor "blueprints" to ovarian cancer patients, I have so much to be thankful for.

 

I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who has helped The Clearity Foundation bring innovation to women who need help. While the founding of Clearity was accomplished through the dedication of friends and colleagues, it has blossomed into a large group of volunteers and advocates who are tireless in their efforts. These volunteers have contributed to our newsletters, they have expanded our biomarker evidence library, our clinical trials coverage, our website capabilities, and created a new database to store profiling test results.

 

I'm also thankful for the support Clearity has received from a wide network of donors and sponsors without whom we could not exist. 

 

You have "cleared a path to a cure" by walking, running, cycling and training - all on behalf of women who are fighting for their lives. I am so very grateful to each of you and for all you do. To facilitate the need to reach more women, we have been fortunate this year to work with Annai Systems and ThoughtWorks, who have generously donated their time and efforts to automate the interpretation of the data and the generation of reports. We are now poised to reach out to more women, provide more help and give more hope.

 

To all of you, thanks for being in the fight with us!

 

Dr. Laura Shawver, founder of The Clearity Foundation

 

Cancer treatment hasn't improved as much as society hoped it would in the 40 years following President Richard M. Nixon's making $1.6 billion available for what became known as the War on Cancer. 

 

Technology, however, has advanced at an astonishing pace since then. And in the next 10 years, new technologies are expected to teach us more about cancer than we have learned in the last five decades combined, said Ron Andrews, President of Medical Science at Life Technologies in Carlsbad. Unfortunately, we should not expect this knowledge to uncover the secret to curing cancer, Andrews told a group of patient advocates, life science professionals and media gathered for the Clearity Foundation's October 23 panel discussion on personalized medicine.

 

People who don't understand cancer may subscribe to the idea that the cure is elusive because life science companies, researchers and/or the government make a profit on people remaining sick. The frustrating truth is that cancer isn't one disease. It's hundreds of diseases. And it is the metastatic nature of cancer that makes it so deadly and hard to combat, said David Nelson, CEO of Epic Sciences, and moderator of the panel discussion. "If we are going to impact cancer, we are going to have to understand metastasis," Nelson said.

 

Harnessing advanced technologies to develop methods for visualizing and tracking cancer cells before they form metastases and finding molecular commonalities between the hundreds of different cancer types are exactly what the "bright stars" of research and medicine represented on the Clearity panel are trying to do, Nelson told the more than 100 people attending the event.

 

Joining Andrews on the panel was Foundation Medicine CEO Michael Pellini, M.D., and The Scripps Research Institute Associate Professor Peter Kuhn, Ph.D. All three men discussed how their employers are using proprietary technologies to contribute to better, more personalized cancer diagnosis, treatment and outcomes. Through their presentations and the ensuing Q&A session, the Clearity gathering helped to continue building a community consensus and agenda for making personalized medicine a widely accepted standard of care.

 

A major theme of the evening was the challenge of convincing regulators and payers to embrace the genetic testing that allows for targeted, personalized medicine. The issue continues to be a major challenge for patients, clinicians, diagnostics companies and the therapeutic companies with which they partner. If reimbursement issues aren't fixed, the investment in new diagnostics and targeted therapies isn't going to happen as it should, the panelists said.

 

That's where Clearity Foundation plays an important role, Andrews said. It can play a part in getting the new wave of genomic information to patients.

 

In the meantime, the San Diego business community has an opportunity to come together to address the issue, said Kuhn. "We know how to deploy investment. We know so much about targets and oncology is one of our sweet spots. We need to get together with private investors and be a part of the solution, and get the entire business community on board," he said.

 

Author Terri Somers is a Principal of Somers Media

 

 

The Clearity Foundation is thankful for the efforts of Dr. Marc Whitlow, who has been involved with Clearity since December 2011 and whose ingenuity and skills are helping Clearity serve women more effectively and efficiently.

 

Marc, a biophysicist-programmer-entrepreneur at Colabrativ Inc., volunteered his time and expertise to create a new database application for Clearity. The application captures the results of patients' tests directly from reports issued by the laboratories that are used to generate tumor profiles for Clearity. It organizes all of the testing data and it also stores all of the Molecular Profiling Summary Reports so that all the information is accessible with the click of a mouse.

 

Marc designed this application so that it can interface with MedTrust Evidence Engine - E2, a software system hosted by Annai Systems. MedTrust E2 can draw upon scientific literature and the hands-on experience of health care professionals to distill "lines of evidence" bearing on the feasibility of alternative drug therapies for specific patients on the basis of the molecular profiles of individual tumors. By running the information through MedTrust E2, data is interpreted in the context of an emerging rapid-learning environment that will be used to further inform treatment decision-making.

 

Today the new database application built for Clearity, coupled with the Annai engine, is making a big impact on the foundation's efficiency. It allows us to serve more patients and spend more time with them because we spend less time with data entry and report writing.  

 

Thank you Marc for your enthusiasm for our mission and for providing us with this incredible product of your expertise and time!

 

The Clearity Foundation has joined over 600 signatories in a consensus letter supporting the proposed federal rule to expand the rights of patients to access their medical test results directly from laboratories. Collectively, the advocacy community has demonstrated a strong and powerful endorsement for the proposed rule, which is expected to help push the matter forward.

 

The letter was submitted to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius on October 26. Click here to read the letter.

 

On Sept. 14, 2011, HHS and other agencies proposed the rule that would give patients in all 50 states expanded rights to their health records. The proposed rule would remove exceptions for CLIA-certified and CLIA-exempt labs from the HIPPA right of access to one's protected health information.