When Karen Maloney, business development manager of the Cancer Vaccine Center (CVC) at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, decided to investigate the competitive landscape of the cancer vaccine field, she looked to a strategic planning and marketing MBA class at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, for help with the research project. There she met Xiaohong Cao, whose bioinformatics background led to the decision to focus on clinical vaccine trials as representative of potential competition. This became Dana-Farber CVC’s first organized attempt to assess in-depth the cancer vaccine market. Cao focused on the analysis of 645 clinical trials related to cancer vaccines. The data was extracted in XML from the ClinicalTrials.gov Web site, and included categories such as “Summary of Purpose,” “Trial Sponsor,” “Phase of the Trial,” “Recruiting Status,” and “Location.” Additional statistics on cancer types, including incidence and survival rates, were retrieved from the National Cancer Institute Surveillance data.

Questions for Discussion
1. How did Dana-Farber Cancer Institute use TIBCO Spotfire to enhance information reporting and visualization?
2. What were the challenge, the proposed solution, and the obtained results?