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The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held the workshop Applying Big Data to Address the Social Determinants of Health in Oncology on October 28–29, 2019, in Washington, DC. This workshop examined social determinants of health (SDOH) in the context of cancer, and considered opportunities to effectively leverage big data to improve health equity and reduce disparities. The workshop featured presentations and discussion by experts in technology, oncology, and SDOH, as well as representatives from government, industry, academia, and health care systems. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

A hallmark of high-quality cancer care is the delivery of the right treatment to the right patient at the right time. Precision oncology therapies, which target specific genetic changes in a patient’s cancer, are changing the nature of cancer treatment by allowing clinicians to select therapies that are most likely to benefit individual patients. In current clinical practice, oncologists are increasingly formulating cancer treatment plans using results from complex laboratory and imaging tests that characterize the molecular underpinnings of an individual patient’s cancer. These molecular fingerprints can be quite complex and heterogeneous, even within a single patient. To enable these molecular tumor characterizations to effectively and safely inform cancer care, the cancer community is working to develop and validate multiparameter omics tests and imaging tests as well as software and computational methods for interpretation of the resulting datasets. To examine opportunities to improve cancer diagnosis and care in the new precision oncology era, the National Cancer Policy Forum developed a two-workshop series. The first workshop focused on patient access to expertise and technologies in oncologic imaging and pathology and was held in February 2018. The second workshop, conducted in collaboration with the Board on Mathematical Sciences and Analytics, was held in October 2018 to examine the use of multidimensional data derived from patients with cancer, and the computational methods that analyze these data to inform cancer treatment decisions. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the second workshop.

Research has long sought to identify biomarkers that could detect cancer at an early stage, or predict the optimal cancer therapy for specific patients. Fueling interest in this research are recent technological advances in genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics that can enable researchers to capture the molecular fingerprints of specific cancers and fine-tune their classification according to the molecular defects they harbor. The discovery and development of new markers of cancer could potentially improve cancer screening, diagnosis, and treatment. Given the potential impact cancer biomarkers could have on the cost effectiveness of cancer detection and treatment, they could profoundly alter the economic burden of cancer as well. Despite the promise of cancer biomarkers, few biomarker-based cancer tests have entered the market, and the translation of research findings on cancer biomarkers into clinically useful tests seems to be lagging. This is perhaps not surprising given the technical, financial, regulatory, and social challenges linked to the discovery, development, validation, and incorporation of biomarker tests into clinical practice. To explore those challenges and ways to overcome them, the National Cancer Policy Forum held the conference "Developing Biomarker-Based Tools for Cancer Screening, Diagnosis and Treatment: The State of the Science, Evaluation, Implementation, and Economics" in Washington, D.C., from March 20 to 22, 2006. At this conference, experts gave presentations in one of six sessions. In addition, seven small group discussions explored the policy implications surrounding biomarker development and adoption into clinical practice. Developing Biomarker-based Tools for Developing Cancer Screening, Diagnosis, and Treatment: The State of the Science, Evaluation, Implementation, and Economics-Workshop Summary presents the conference proceedings and will be used by an Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee to develop consensus-based recommendations for moving the field of cancer biomarkers forward.