Bonnie J. Addario, a former oil-company executive in San Francisco, is a lung-cancer survivor. When she first started thinking about how to make a difference, she figured, “I’ll run a gala and a golf tournament, raise money for research, and that will be it.” Mrs. Addario, 60, raised $800,000 through a foundation she set up in 2006. She distributed the money to a number of researchers, and then realized, “there are a lot of wonderful people doing great work, but lung-cancer survival rates [of 15.5% after five years] haven’t changed for 40 years. Why is that?”

To find answers, Mrs. Addario and her husband, along with David M. Jablons, her surgeon from the University of California, San Francisco, put together a two-day conference last fall of lung-cancer researchers from major institutions around the world. She says the group identified a number of problems that hinder progress toward a cure. Among them: Researchers didn’t know what others were doing, tissue and blood specimens needed for experiments weren’t centrally located or shared, and the findings of experiments weren’t integrated to help assess what the key priorities should be.

Mrs. Addario started a new organization, the Addario Lung Cancer Medical Institute, and hired CollabRx to address some of these issues. The company is helping the institute build a virtual specimen bank where researchers participating in the project can share patient specimens and establish joint standards for collecting future specimens. Using the CollabRx Web-based network, the researchers can share research and ideas, and quickly reprioritize projects as new information comes up. Mrs. Addario says the institute expects to spend at least $5 million over the next year to set up the virtual biotech, fund researchers and establish the specimen bank.

(as reported in the Wall Street Journal)