EDRN Bi-Monthly Steering Committee Call 

Wednesday, August 20, 2025 

3:30 p.m. ET/2:30 pm CT/1:30 pm PT 

Present (in BOLD):

• Chair: Arul Chinnaiyan, University of Michigan
• Co-Chair: Karen Anderson, Arizona State University
• NCI: Sudhir Srivastava, Felicia Evans-Long, Sidney Fu, Nick Hodges, Indu Kohaar, Amit Kumar, Guillermo Marquez, Richard Mazurchuk, Altaf Mohammed, Christos Patriotis, Angela Petruzzelli, Neeraj Saxena, Amanda Skarlupka, Wendy Wang, Matt Young
• Arizona State University: Josh LaBaer
• Baylor: Fasiha Kanwal, Erich Sturgis
• Boston University: Marc Lenburg, Jennifer Beane-Ebel, Erin Kane
• Case Western Reserve University: Sanford Markowitz
• Dana-Farber Cancer Institute: Sapna Syngal
• Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center: Jackie Dahlgren, Ruth Etzioni, Ziding Feng, William Grady, Christopher Li, Royce Malnik, Amanda Paulovich, Lesley Wilkerson, Cecilia Yeung, Yingye Zheng
• George Washington University: Laura Rozek
• Icahn School of Medicine Mt. Sinai: Pei Wang
• JPL: Daniel Crichton, Heather Kincaid
• Johns Hopkins University: Daniel Chan, Ie-Ming Shih, David Sidransky, Victor Velculescu, Hui Zhang, Zhen Zhang
• Massachusetts: Steven Skates, Alan Cha
• Meso Scale: Anu Mathew, Martin Stengelin, Mingyue Wang
• Moffitt: Antonio Amelio, Anna Giuliano, John Heine, Julie Rathwell, Matt Schabath
• NIDCR: Zhong Chen, Amanda Melillo
• NIST: Hua-Jun He
• New York University: Harvey Pass, Leopoldo Segal
• PNNL: Tao Liu
• University of California, Los Angeles: William Hsu, Mike Palazzolo
• University of California, San Diego: Ludmil Alexandrov, Silvio Gutkind, Scott Lippman University of California, San Francisco: Fatemeh (Flora) Momen Heravi
• University of Colorado: Sachin Wani
• University Health Network: Thomas Kislinger
• University Hospitals/Cleveland Medical Center: Amitabh Chak
• University of Illinois, Chicago: Xiaowei Wang
• University of Maryland: Sanford Stass 
• University of Michigan: Neehar Parikh, Steve Chinn
• University of North Carolina: Nicholas Shaheen
• University of Nebraska: Surinder Batra, Brittney Dickey
• University of Pittsburgh: Randall Brand, James Herman, Robert Schoen, Christine Worthington 
• University of Toledo: James Willey
• University of Texas MD Anderson: Robert Bast, Robert Bresalier, Sam Hanash, Leo Lei, Anirban Maitra, Ed Ostrin, David Wilson
• University of Texas Southwestern: Amit Singal
• University of Washington: William Grady, Andy Hoofnagle, Savannah Partridge
• Washington University: Hua Li
• Vanderbilt: Stephen Deppen, Eric Grogan, Michael Kammer, Jeff Tosoian
• Yale University: Sara Pai, Abhijit Patel

Discussion

Minutes to June 18th Call: Approved as written. 

NCI Updates: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya sent priorities for NIH which can be found here: https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/nih-director/statements/advancing-nihs-mission-through-unified-strategy EDRN members need to review this. This outlines the priorities of the NIH.  A lot of what is outlined there is already being done by the EDRN such as data warehousing and data harmonization. We are making all the data captured in LabCAS to be compliant with EDRN principles like being reproducible and transparent. Important for EDRN to address any shortcomings with data.

EDRN Executive Call on Wednesday, August 27th: Will review points for the NCT meeting. Will go over the EDRN presentation for the NCT. Will need input from the Committee members--here is the charge to the Collaborative Groups in preparation for NCT meeting:

• Accomplishments (all cycles)

o Are there tests read for inclusion into a trial network (NCCN)?

o Are there any validated phase 3 biomarkers? 

o Are there any CLIA assay in development?

o Are there any biomarkers test with CPT codes? 

• Ongoing projects (high value)

o Biomarkers in the pipeline for phase 3 validation?

• Created resources

o Reference sets

o Images

• Collaborations

o Industry,

o Foundations,

o Other partners

• Vision for next EDRN cycle

The timeline for this meeting is very tight—presenters only have 7 minutes to present.  Robert Bresalier will send Sudhir Srivastava a slide with the summary of the adjudication process of the reference sets to include in his infrastructure presentation. 

EDRN Steering Committee Meeting, September 17-19, 2025 in Seattle, WA: 

• DMCC will find someone from Fred Hutch leadership to give Welcome Address and keynote presentations. 
• For the Executive Committee Meeting on Thursday, September 18th from 12-2pm, each Collaborative Group will prepare a 7-minute presentation based on the charge listed above under EDRN Executive Committee on Wednesday, August 27th. 
• CSRN/EDRN Meeting: Goal is to present ideas for collaboration between these consortia. Want any shovel-ready assays to analyze MCED positive samples from individuals plus controls, about 1200 samples. Assays should be tissue-specific so they can be reflex tests or comparison tests for performance for non-tissue specific tests. This would be retrospective. Determine how many biomarker panels we have, how feasible is this, what additional biofluids need to be collected, what volumes are needed. DMCC can help with this. Would be good to know about the preliminary analysis for the Vanguard study for any proposal we prepare and submit. Ziding Feng is working on the preliminary analysis for Vanguard. He expects that they will recruit about 500 cancers of both men and women.  Yingye Zheng said that mathematical modeling can be used to project impacts on the ultimate outcome and if it will change.  Can also determine the kind of performance that is needed and the milestones for that. Will discuss further at next week’s Executive Committee meeting—need anticipated numbers of different cancer subtypes that might show up in the MCED positive groups.  Will discuss more at the EC meeting. 

Upcoming EDRN Meetings:

• EDRN Steering Committee Meeting, March 4-6, 2025 in Houston, TX at MD Anderson
• Fall, 2026 EDRN 15th Scientific Workshop: Dates, Location TBD

Updates (5-10 min each) 

• Reference Set Working Group: Robert Bresalier provided an update saying that they’ve adjudicated many applications. The process has been   relatively expeditious and fair. The only issue to deal with is now is reference sets that will remain at Frederick. 
• Statistical Group Update: Ziding Feng reported that there have not been any meetings in the past couple of months.  
• Early-stage Investigators: Not a lot of action with the ESI—more discussion at the Steering Committee meeting in Seattle. 

25 years of EDRN? Think of ways to celebrate this milestone. 

AACR: Karen Anderson has reached out to AACR scientific community for an early detection-focused session at their next meeting. 

Next Meeting: 44th EDRN Steering Committee Meeting, September 17-19, 2025 in Seattle, WA