Health of Women Study
In July 2009, the National Cancer Institute, the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, and the City of Hope announced their collaboration to create a 21st century research model—the Health of Women (HOW) Study—to build the first ever online cohort of one million women.
This collaboration takes advantage of the Love/Avon Army of Women, a groundbreaking initiative that was launched in October 2008 to recruit women of all ages and ethnicities, with or without breast cancer to sign up for clinical research investigating the causes and prevention of breast cancer.
"In this partnership, caBIG® provides the biomedical informatics support—developing easy access Web-based software that connects women and researchers with the goal of improving prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of breast cancer."
-Ken Buetow, Ph.D. (NCI)
Members of the Army of Women are invited to join the Health of Women study and to respond to a series of periodic secure online questionnaires concerning their health history. Authorized researchers, who are partners in this initiative, can then access the database and design study protocols based on the clinical profiles and data of potential research participants. The goal is for this project to enable an "interactive" and "dynamic" approach to research.
"We would not be able to do this project without the collaboration of caBIG®... leveraging a lot of what has been done already and has been built by caBIG® and BIG Health has allowed us to jump start."
-Susan Love, M.D. (Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation)
The HOW Study was first launched by sending an email invitation to the 250,000 women already enrolled Army of Women at that time. With a single contact, 10,000 women participated in the first set of questions/modules within ten days and nearly 30,000 women completed the first module in the first month—a remarkable response for such a study given the time, and "low-touch" nature.
"I have colleagues who have been working for years to collect the amount of data that we were able to collect within a couple of weeks. In fact, in the first ten days of our study, ten thousand women joined and completed the questionnaire."
-Leslie Bernstein, Ph.D. (Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope)
Using the HOW Study as a model, other cancer advocacy groups or affinity organizations can undertake similar web-based research studies using this technology—mobilizing large numbers of consumers and patients to share health information for cohort studies in other types of cancer.
In The News
NCI Tackles Trial Enrollment
The Scientist discusses the collaboration between caBIG® and the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation.
Love/Avon Army of Women to Use NCI's caBIG® Computational Platform for Breast Cancer Research
GenomeWeb/BioInform reports on how caBIG® is serving as the computational infrastructure for this joint venture.
Other Resources
- Consumers, patients, and researchers can learn more at www.armyofwomen.org
- Learn more about this and other BIG Health Consortium™ Projects at www.bighealthconsortium.org
- Read Dr. Love's official announcement of this collaboration
- Listen to the Podcast "Army of Women and caBIG®: Uniting Women and Researchers Through Biomedical Informatics"
- View the NIH Videocast about this collaboration
- Read Dr. Niederhuber's remarks in The Cancer Bulletin: Director's Update
- Download Dr. Ken Buetow's presentation from the 2009 caBIG® Annual Meeting
- Download Dr. Susan Love's presentation from the 2009 caBIG® Annual Meeting
View a video about the Health of Women Study.
Listen to this podcast about this collaboration.
"We would not be able to do this project without the collaboration of caBIG®."
"This is the first 21st Century biomedical research network that puts consumers centrally in control of what's going on."
