Overview
What It Is
Project Data Sphere, LLC operates a free digital library-laboratory where the research community can broadly share, integrate, and analyze historical, de-identified, patient-level data from academic and industry cancer Phase II–III clinical trials. These datasets are available to researchers affiliated with life science companies, hospitals and institutions, as well as independent researchers, at no cost and without requiring a research proposal. re3data.org
Origins & Governance
PDS is an independent initiative of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer Life Sciences Consortium, built to voluntarily share, integrate, and analyze comparator arms of historical cancer clinical trial datasets to advance future cancer research. It aims to provide a neutral, broad-access platform for industry and academia to share raw, de-identified data from late-phase oncology clinical trials. PubMed
The Core Focus: Comparator Arms
The distinguishing feature of PDS is its emphasis on control/comparator arm data — the standard-of-care arms of Phase III trials that are typically never published or shared. Phase III clinical trials generate large volumes of potentially usable information, often on hundreds of patients, including patients treated with standard-of-care therapies (i.e., controls) — data that would otherwise remain siloed within individual companies. PubMed Central
PDS's focus on clinical trial data differentiates it from similar efforts such as AACR's Project GENIE and ASCO's CancerLinQ. American Association for Cancer Research
Scale & Coverage
PDS has amassed data on nearly 30,000 patients across many cancer types. Industry collaborators have included Amgen, AstraZeneca, Bayer, Celgene, EMD Serono, Janssen, Lilly, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Sanofi, and Synta Pharmaceuticals. Institutional participants have included Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the NCI's National Clinical Trials Network cooperative group, the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology. Cancer types represented include prostate, lung, blood, breast, kidney, and pancreatic cancers. Advanced Analytics & Health Equity
PDS is described as a first-of-its-kind research environment providing broad access to both de-identified patient-level clinical trial data and advanced analytic tools to enable big data-driven research. To address health disparities, selected PDS datasets have been augmented by linking the social, economic, and health-related characteristics of cancer survivors from nationally representative survey data (the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey / MEPS).
Access Model
Notably open by design — datasets are available at no cost and without requiring a research proposal, lowering the barrier to entry compared to many other clinical data-sharing platforms that require formal data access applications.
What Makes It Distinctive
Compared to databases like TCGA (genomics-focused), COSMIC (somatic mutation-focused), or C-CAT (CGP testing in Japan), PDS is uniquely focused on real-world clinical trial outcomes data — demographics, treatment history, response, adverse events, survival — drawn from the control arms of late-phase trials. It fills a gap that no other major repository covers: the systematic rescue and democratization of comparator-arm patient data that would otherwise be buried in sponsor files after trial completion.
Notes
Complementary to Vivli. Growing gynecologic oncology holdings.