Cancer: From a Kingdom to a Commons

Abstract

This chapter explores a privately governed collaborative composed of doctors and hospitals that seeks to aggregate, manage access to, and draw insights from oncology treatment data. The thesis behind this collaboration is simple: If cancer treatment data could be aggregated on a large scale, scientists believe they could be able to select more effective treatments for particular cancers, and even for particular patients. Over time, this cooperative process could theoretically spur a “virtuous cycle” of medical advancement: more effective treatments would encourage more doctors, hospitals, and care centers to contribute even more data, which in turn, would improve the quality of care, and so on.

Keywords: big data, data pools, data pooling, data-intensive science, intellectual property, collective action, innovation policy, innovation theory, information transactions, information exchange, innovation, health data, cancer treatment, machine learning

JEL Classification: O34, D45, O31, O32, K32