Can we deconstruct cancer, one patient at a time?

Patients with cancer face an ever-widening gap between the exponential rate at which technology improves and the linear rate at which these advances are translated into clinical practice. Closing this gap will require the establishment of learning loops that intimately link lab and clinic and enable the immediate transfer of knowledge, thereby engaging highly motivated patients with cancer as true partners in research. Here, we discuss the goal of creating a distributed network that aims to place world-class resources at the disposal of select patients with cancer and their oncologists, and then use these intensively monitored individual patient experiences to improve collective understanding of how cancer works.