Oak Ridge lab joins national program to defeat cancer

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — Oak Ridge National Laboratory is part of the Obama administration’s sweeping program to defeat cancer, joining with other labs and the National Cancer Institute on pilot projects that use supercomputers to analyze data on how cancer develops and to accelerate development of promising therapies.

The Cancer Moonshot program, led by Vice President Joe Biden, hosted a summit Wednesday in Washington to draw attention to projects around the nation that involve hundreds of researchers, oncologists and technologies of many types.

ORNL is part of a “strategic computing partnership” between the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Cancer Institute. Four of the DOE’s national labs are involved, including Oak Ridge.

The White House released information this week on the computing partnership and announced the launch of three pilot projects that will bring together nearly 100 cancer researchers, care providers, computer scientists and engineers “to apply the nation’s most advanced supercomputing capabilities” to analyze preclinical models in cancer, molecular interaction data and cancer surveillance data.

The partners include the Oak Ridge, Argonne, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories, working in conjunction with the National Cancer Institute’s Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research.

ORNL’s Titan supercomputer is the nation’s fastest computer, capable of 20 million billion calculations per second, and is developing another system that will be at least 10 times as fast.

“By joining these forces under a coordinated effort,” the announcement stated, “these new projects will refine our understanding of the mechanisms leading to cancer development and thereby accelerate the development of promising therapies that are more effective and less toxic.”