Oak Ridge National Laboratory and its Titan supercomputer are helping the U.S. Department of Energy fight cancer through a national initiative called Cancer Moonshot.

U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz wrote about the use of DOE supercomputers to fight cancer in an article posted on Medium.com on Friday.

“Cancer is a worldwide public health problem, and the second-leading cause of death in the United States,” Moniz said. “Although cancer mortality has declined in recent years, there is no one who hasn’t been touched by cancer personally. So when President Obama announced that Vice President Biden would lead the Cancer Moonshot during his State of the Union address and asked for all hands on deck, I was eager to join the Cancer Moonshot Task Force and lend the support of the Department of Energy and our 17 national laboratories.”

As part of the initiative, the U.S. Department of Energy is launching three pilot projects in partnership with the National Cancer Institute, ORNL spokesperson Morgan McCorkle said. The projects will bring together nearly 100 cancer researchers, care providers, computer scientists, and engineers to apply the nation’s most advanced supercomputing capabilities to analyze data from preclinical models in cancer, cancer surveillance data, and molecular interaction data for RAS genes, McCorkle said. (About one third of all human cancers, including a high percentage of pancreatic, lung, and colorectal cancers, are driven by mutations in RAS genes, according to the National Cancer Institute.) [Read more…]