Health agencies will share cancer drug data

The Food and Drug Administration and the National Cancer Institute are teaming to up to build a grid-computing system that will let drug researchers share developmental data about cancer drugs.The initiative will let researchers electronically submit applications to investigate new drugs, FDA commissioner Mark McClellan said. It also will give cancer researchers online access to FDA’s drug review databases, letting them access and evaluate clinical trial data, he said. The effort is part of the cancer institute’s broader online initiative, the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid Project.McClellan described the data-sharing project yesterday at a meeting of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee in Arlington, Va.The project sprang from an interagency task force formed in May to study ways to expedite the review process for new cancer drugs.For more information about the grid project, click on .