A Salt Lake City-based startup called Taproot Health Inc. has launched an effort to build a national oncology database, and has signed up five National Cancer Institute-Designated Cancer Centers to advance the effort.
Taproot Health Inc. has launched a National Oncology Master Trial, the Master Registry of Oncology Outcomes Associated to Testing and Treatment (ROOT).
“ROOT is a new class of master protocols known as the Master Observational Trial (MOT) designed to collect regulatory-grade real-world data benefitting all stakeholders in cancer care,” explained Dane J. Dickson, M.D., Taproot Health’s co-founder and CEO, in a statement.
The five cancer centers working with Taproot are the University of California at San Diego Moores Cancer Center; the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson Health in Philadelphia; the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health Science University, Portland, Ore.; Community Oncology Clinics, Utah Cancer Specialists, Salt Lake City; and Teton Cancer Institute, Idaho Falls, Idaho.
“This endeavor is crucial to advancing the field of precision oncology. The data will provide the large-scale, high-quality evidence to answer complex questions that can be solved in no other way,” said Razelle Kurzrock, M.D., director of the Center for Personalized Cancer Therapy at the University of California at San Diego and principal investigator for ROOT, in a statement.
Rebecca Owens, Taproot Health’s co-founder and chief commercial officer, said the company’s data-as-a-service enterprise is geared toward uniting all oncology stakeholders in creating a nationwide oncology database comprised of patient-consented, high-quality prospective data that meets rigorous scientific standards.
