A new research collaboration involving the National Institutes of Health, the FDA and three drugmakers will be launched today in hopes of getting cancer drugs to the market faster, and test five experimental breast cancer medsReuters writes.

The $26 million, five-year study will be called Investigation of Serial Studies to Predict your Therapeutic Response with Imaging and Molecular Analysis, or I-SPY2, and use DNA to match the best drug to each patient, and more quickly toss approaches that don’t work or are too toxic. The companies - Amgen, Abbott Labs and Pfizer - agreed to share info on using genes to predict how well patients respond as part of The Biomarkers Consortium, which includes the FDA, the NIH and PhRMA, the industry trade group.

“I think it is the theme for the future of research,” Anna Barker, deputy director of the National Cancer Institute, tells Reuters. “It is the best combination I have seen of state-of-the art biomarkers and state-of-the-art drugs that enable us to put drugs into patients and start evaluating them on a faster basis. It’ll speed up the whole process.”

Patients at 20 cancer centers will be tested after biopsies, but before any surgery, they will be treated with one of 12 different drugs. The group has FDA approval to drop and add drugs throughout the trial without having to stop to write a new protocol. Safeway is paying for a large part of experiment, and Johnson & Johnson, Genentech and Lilly will also provide funding.

UCSF Chancellor and former Genentech exec Sue Desmond-Hellmann says the approach could save the healthcare system money. “It has the opportunity to make clinical trials more efficient so we will spend less to develop new remedies,” she tells Reuters. “I predict that companies will be watching this.”