Mitchell Chan, a board-certified pharmacist in pharmacotherapy and a University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC) student, stands at the cutting edge of data science as a player in a White House initiative to end cancer.
An active-duty lieutenant commander with the U.S. Public Health Service, Chan is stationed at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Oncology Center of Excellence (OCE) as a clinical analyst. He leads the team for Project Facilitate, a novel program dedicated to expanding individual oncology patients’ access to life-saving treatments and therapies still under investigation.
The program allows the use of medical products which have not yet received government approval for individual patients for whom no clinical trial options exist. The program also provides patients with a single point of call for taking part in Project Facilitate.
Chan said that when President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden reignited the Cancer Moonshot initiative, the umbrella for dozens of nationwide initiatives designed to reduce new cancer occurrences while also improving the outcomes for existing cancer cases, the FDA and OCE started receiving White House requests for metrics and impact.
“We are very fortunate to be highlighted by the White House’s Cancer Moonshot after the 2024 State of the Union, and I believe that my data analytics education is evolving our ability to show the impact of our program,” said Chan, who completed the UMGC course, DATA 620 Data Management and Visualization, in spring 2024.
“The most important thing I learned in DATA 620 was how to approach a dataset and how to tell a story through impactful data analysis,” he said. “The class showed me how to portray data through impactful visualizations that support the story I'm telling through data.”
In the data analyses used for the OCE’s reporting to both FDA leadership and the White House’s Cancer Moonshot, Chan was able to apply what he learned at UMGC to program metrics and forecast data trends.
“This really highlighted to me the importance of data analytics in the regulatory science and clinical realm,” said Chan.
Chan earned a Doctor of Pharmacy in 2015, completed a postgraduate residency in 2016 and is now pursuing a Master of Science in Data Analytics at UMGC. Like many professionals, he returned to school out of necessity.
“When I helped launch OCE’s Project Facilitate back in 2019, I was faced with a waterfall of data and needed to find a way to use the data to show the impact of our program over time while ensuring reporting was accurate, effective and efficient,” he said.
He said the Cancer Moonshot initiative not only allowed him to see firsthand how critical his data science and data analytics skills were to the national program, but it also made him realize he needed a more formal data analytics education.
When he applied data science, data management and data analytics skills to Project Facilitate, he saw immediate improvements in reporting accuracy and capabilities. The way data was reported to senior leadership was revolutionized overnight.
“Over time, I became more involved in data science around the FDA and continued to apply my data analytics skills and programming to real-world problems,” Chan explained. By boosting his data science education, his coursework at UMGC enabled him to discuss complex data issues with a range of audiences.
“By being able to see how data behaves in an organization and how it should be managed and processed, I can now seamlessly discuss findings with our data contractors while also translating them at a high level to clinical and regulatory leadership in a way everyone understands,” he said.
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