By pooling the resources of multinational pharmaceutical, biotechnology companies, academic centers and oncologists, it intends to create access to over 60 novel and approved agents under exploration in the war against cancer and is expected to enable rapid testing of novel immunotherapy combination protocols.

The difficulty of treating cancer has led researchers to develop more and more targeted drugs and immune therapies, with the future goal of hitting "cancers with several such treatments at once, much the way AIDS was tamed when researchers developed drugs to strike the virus at its vulnerable points.

[3] Participating members include pharmaceutical companies Amgen and Celgene, biotech companies including NantWorks, NantKwest, Etubics, Altor BioScience, and Precision Biologics, a subsidiary of NantWorks, major academic cancer centers, community oncologists, health insurer Independence Blue Cross, and Bank of America,[4] reportedly one of the largest self-insured companies in the U.S.[5] The scope of the project is to conduct dozens of small-scale clinical trials over the next few years in the field of immunotherapy, with as many as 20,000 patients.

[citation needed] The Partnership for Accelerating Cancer Therapies (PACT) was announced in October 2017 as a collaboration between the National Institutes of Health and eleven pharmaceutical companies.

During an appropriations hearing, Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) asked von Eschenbach what it would take to move the date up to 2010.