Cancer HealthCast: SEER Program Marks 50 Years of Cancer Research with New Data Initiatives

2023 will be a big year for the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) Program as it celebrates 50 years of using data to monitor trends and support research on the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of cancer. The SEER Program, which is funded by the National Cancer Institute, is making significant strides to decrease the burden of cancer through a suite of analytical tools that better capture data and make it more accessible to the research community. Steve Friedman, senior advisor for operations with the Surveillance Research Program in the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at NCI, unpacks two new data initiatives, the Virtual Bio-Repository and the Virtual Pool Registry, that will allow researchers to collect additional clinical data and remove barriers for conducting multi-site cancer studies.