RADIANT Toolkit to Spark Improved Real-time Patient Care Through Data Sharing

The RADIANT toolkit will empower cancer and rare disease research in real time to improve the care of children.

For the first time at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) has awarded investigators from the Center for Data-Driven Discovery in Biomedicine (D3b) up to $10 million in funding. With support from the Mission Office Innovative Solutions Openings award, researchers seek to develop new architecture designed to integrate data streams for cancer and other rare diseases to accelerate discoveries and improve patient care.

When a patient steps into their doctor's office to be treated for any given disease, a data stream begins behind the scenes as information from the visit is uploaded to their electronic health record. Running parallel to this clinical data is multi-omic research data generated from patient samples collected from biobanks, imaging centers, and clinical trials.

Dr. Resnick announced the RADIANT toolkit project with co-investigator Allison Heath, PhD, at the Children’s Brain Tumor Network Summit Oct. 9.

"Our vision is that clinicians and researchers are able to access real-time data about all patients, harnessing cloud-based tools and computation to advance real-time decision-making and diagnostics," said Adam Resnick, PhD, Co-executive Director of D3b and a research scientist in the Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics at CHOP. "[This data will also] expedite a patient's access to potential precision medicines, personalized treatments, or relevant clinical trials."

Following the launch and growing success of Arcus Omics and the CHOP Biobank, the Real-time Analysis and Discovery in Integrated And Networked Technologies (RADIANT) toolkit will continue to expand on the Research Institute's Omics and Big Data Initiative. The initiative aims to encourage the use of omics – the study of genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and microbiomics – to help scientists understand genetic contributions to diseases and shape the future of personalized pediatric medicine.

Building upon the interactive platforms and online tools created for the NIH-sponsored Gabriella Miller Kids First Data Resource Center and the INCLUDE (INvestigation of Co-occurring conditions across the Lifespan to Understand Down syndromE) Data Hub, investigators in D3b will modify the existing architecture and develop new technology for RADIANT, allowing for real-time integration and interpretation of patient data within a secure network of hospitals across the nation. CHOP will be the coordinating center for this multi-institutional initiative, partnering with more than 35 institutions in the Children's Brain Tumor Network (CBTN) and the Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium to leverage multi-institutional datasets.

This multi-site initiative will partner with more than 35 institutions.

Pediatric brain tumors are the driver use case for the RADIANT toolkit, which is aligned with the research initiatives of CBTN and D3b. At the core of the D3b brain tumor mission framework is the need to accelerate the process by which patient data can be connected and interpreted across an increasingly multimodal landscape. This is an unmet need for some of the most common diseases as well, according to Dr. Resnick. The toolkit will follow new standards developed for the Kids First framework called Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource, which governs how electronic health record data is exchanged across a wide range of systems.

"With RADIANT, we're excited to leverage the development CHOP has been a part of through these federal programs to support the deployment of this new architecture as a local resource that can be extensible to other diseases being studied at the Research Institute," Dr. Resnick said.

For many patients with pediatric brain tumors, there is no curative standard of care. The RADIANT toolkit will be a step toward standardizing data that comes in from multiple workflows so an oncologist can then compare a patient's variables to other similar patient information in the network to see what they may have been treated with and what their outcomes were in real-time.

Dr. Heath, Director of Data Technology and Innovation at D3b, brings her expertise in bioinformatics and cloud computing to this initiative.

Technology driven workflows that allow for integration of this real-time data also play a critical role in the validation of the data to support clinical trial design. Often, concerns about using real-world data to inform clinical trials stem from the fact that data may not be well-controlled and therefore not meet the standards needed for prospective clinical trials, resulting in a need for a control arm.

Because the RADIANT framework will connect across computer systems, uploaded data can be audited and traced to both provide a comprehensive patient picture and ensure information accuracy, potentially minimizing the need to recruit placebo groups for trials.

"We're at the frontline of innovating new technologies that will benefit our own bespoke cases of pediatric brain tumors and other rare diseases," Dr. Resnick said, "but we're poised to drive national infrastructure and innovate on behalf of precision medicine at large."