Case Study: National Cancer Institute crowdsources 1,600+ cancer research ideas to accelerate the Cancer Moonshot with IdeaScale

National Cancer Institute A Decade’s Worth of Progress in Five Years

The National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the NIH, needed a fast, inclusive way to gather ideas and public input to support the Obama administration’s Cancer Moonshot and to ensure the Blue Ribbon Panel’s priorities reflected the research community and patients. The challenge was to surface high‑impact, actionable opportunities that could help “make a decade’s worth of progress in five years” while breaking down silos across research, care and advocacy.

NCI deployed an IdeaScale-powered Cancer Research Ideas crowdsourcing site to collect submissions across eight topic areas and have them reviewed weekly by the Blue Ribbon Panel. The effort generated more than 1,600 ideas from researchers, patients and the public, validated the panel’s direction, and directly informed the panel’s final report of 10 transformative recommendations and several actionable themes around data sharing, clinical trials, prevention, immunotherapy and survivorship.

National Cancer Institute