The Big Question

What if we could adapt cancer treatments as tumors mutate and change? 

The Problem

Cancers are highly prone to mutation, allowing tumors to evolve and evade once effective treatment strategies. Changes in the DNA, RNA, and protein profiles of cancers can all cause resistance to therapies, making it challenging for doctors to identify the best approach to treat the changing tumor. Therapy-resistant cancers are more difficult to treat and require later-line therapies associated with harsher side effects.  

The Current State

Recent advances have enabled more personalized cancer therapy approaches. However, only limited biomarker analyses are performed on tumors, generally prior to treatment. Because of the dynamic nature of tumor evolution, combating therapy resistance is a continuous game of catch-up. While most patients with metastatic cancer develop resistance to therapy, changes to the treatment plan are not commonly driven by tumor biology data.   

The Challenge

The ADvanced Analysis for Precision cancer Therapy (ADAPT) program aims to harness advanced technologies and a deep understanding of tumor biology to build cancer biomarkers. By tracking tumor changes before, during, and after treatment, clinicians can pinpoint alterations in tumor traits, enabling a more proactive response to cancer care.  

A key feature of ADAPT will be to establish a central hub for clinicians and researchers to access data and resources. This repository will house algorithms, protocols, and evolving data on biomarkers and anti-cancer agents. These tools will allow clinicians to deliver truly adaptive and personalized cancer care. 

The Solution

ADAPT aims to bring together researchers in systems biology, bioinformatics, mathematical modeling, and oncology to address the challenge of treating ever-changing metastatic cancer. To meet this goal, the ADAPT program invites proposals to three technical areas. Technical area 1 focuses on therapy recommendation techniques, including multi-modal data fusion, resistant trait modeling, and development of biomarkers to predict drug response. Technical area 2 focuses on a new evolutionary clinical trial that treats patients during multiple therapy lines by discovering emergent resistant traits and therapy biomarkers developed in technical area 1. Technical area 3 unites researchers and clinicians through the creation of a cancer treatment and analysis platform to enable real-time data availability. The goal of the program is to accurately predict which patients will respond to which therapies, improving survival in people with metastatic cancers. 

Why ARPA-H

ADAPT’s goal to track tumors changes through multiple lines of treatment is poised to harness cutting-edge advancements across predictive modeling and tumor biology to revolutionize cancer care with a truly adaptive approach.