Watch on Demand | This webcast took place on: Wednesday 3 September 2025
Cancer research has always been a collective effort. But collaboration across institutions often hits barriers: fragmented data, siloed systems, and the sheer complexity of managing multimodal information.
In a recent Nature Custom Media webcast, produced by Manifold, leaders from the American Cancer Society (ACS) joined forces to discuss how a trusted research environment is helping to overcome these obstacles, and accelerating the pace of discovery.
Decades of Data, Poised for Discovery
Dr. Alpa Patel, Senior Vice President of Population Science at ACS, opened with a history of the Society’s landmark Cancer Prevention Studies (CPS). Since the 1950s, these long-term, population-based studies have followed more than 2.5 million participants, tracking risk factors, lifestyle patterns, biological specimens, and health outcomes over decades.
From the early links between smoking and cancer to today’s cutting-edge work on genetics, obesity, and environmental exposures, the CPS cohorts have shaped our understanding of cancer risk and survivorship.
As we continue to capture new modalities of data that will drive the next generation of insights and treatments, the challenge becomes finding the right technical solutions to integrate data and ensuring tools for innovative research.
The Collaboration Challenge
As Dr. Patel explained, ACS needed a way to:
- Unify multimodal data across decades of studies
- Reduce dependence on institutional knowledge for accessing datasets
- Streamline participant engagement for new initiatives like Voices of Black Women, a groundbreaking online study designed to engage Black women across the U.S. in long-term cancer research
Enter Manifold.
We often fall into the trap of solving just for one problem for data by building bespoke solutions. Planning for an end to end journey requires an adaptable platform that can be used to unlock the full potential of the data being collected.
- Nirav Amin, VP Client Solutions | Manifold
Building a Trusted Research Environment
Nirav Amin, VP of Scientific Solutions at Manifold, described how the Manifold platform provides an end-to-end environment for data collection, harmonization, and analysis.
Key capabilities include:
- Participant portals: Seamless onboarding, surveys, consent, and ongoing engagement in one secure platform
- Data cataloging and cohort exploration: Making decades of fragmented data discoverable and usable, without requiring advanced coding skills
- Collaborative workbenches: High-code and no-code environments where researchers can analyze datasets, run bioinformatics pipelines, and share findings securely
Caroline Um of ACS highlighted how these tools have already improved recruitment, survey design, and retention strategies, especially for long-term cohort studies that require sustained engagement over decades.
Real-World Impact
Concrete improvements are already emerging:
- Digital pathology images can now be shared instantly in the cloud, eliminating the old practice of mailing hard drives.
- External researchers can be granted secure workbench access to de-identified data, streamlining collaboration while protecting confidentiality.
- Complex datasets, like gut microbiome sequencing files, are processed within Manifold, integrated with CPS survey data, and made analysis-ready, cutting time and effort for researchers.
Looking Ahead: The Next Decade of Collaboration
During the Q&A, the panelists looked to the future of trusted research environments:
- Expanding integration with electronic health records and self-monitoring devices
- Making emerging bioinformatics tools rapidly available within secure platforms
- Designing infrastructures flexible enough to handle the next generation of multimodal data
The goal is clear: accelerate discoveries in cancer prevention and treatment by enabling more researchers to ask—and answer—complex questions at scale.
The Takeaway
Cancer research depends on collaboration. By pairing ACS’s legacy of population science with Manifold’s modern data infrastructure, a trusted research environment is making it possible to break down silos, simplify collaboration, and speed progress against cancer.
As Dr. Patel summarized, this work is about more than data, it’s about building a foundation for the next era of prevention, survivorship, and precision medicine.
Watch on Demand | This webcast took place on: Wednesday 3 September 2025