National Cancer Institute's early detection research network: a model organization for biomarker research

For many cancers a primary cause of poor survival is that they are detected at a late stage when therapies are less effective. Although screening methods exist to detect some types of cancer at an early stage, there are currently no effective methods to screen for most types of cancer. Biomarkers have the potential to improve detection of early-stage cancers, risk stratification, and prediction of which pre-cancerous lesions are likely to progress and to make screening tests less invasive. Although thousands of research articles on biomarkers for early detection are published every year, few of these biomarkers have been validated and shown to be clinically useful. This reflects both the inherent difficulty in detecting early-stage cancers and a disconnect between the process of discovering biomarkers and their use in the clinic. To overcome this limitation the US National Cancer Institute created the Early Detection Research Network. It is a highly collaborative program that brings together biomarker discoverers, assay developers, and clinicians. It provides an infrastructure that is essential for developing and validating biomarkers and imaging methods for early cancer detection and has successfully completed several multicenter validation studies.