New investigative methods and technologies are yielding information about cancer and its treatment at an overwhelming pace, making it difficult for researchers to build on advances from gene and protein studies, clinical trials, and other work. At present, there is no common mechanism for cancer researchers or research institutions to easily share data and no common standard for the technologies they use.
Developers of the Cancer Bioinformatics Grid (caBIG) hope to solve this problem by creating an open-source, open-access network that enables researchers to share data and technology according to common standards and needs. The project is a collaborative effort among the National Cancer Institute, its national cancer centers, and others in the cancer research field.
"We actually have an informatics Tower of Babel," said NCI project director Ken Buetow, Ph.D. "Each part of the cancer research community speaks its own scientific dialect. They publish in their own journals. They deposit their data in their own databases."
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For example, an investigator conducting a clinical trial at the University of California at San Francisco could use caBIG to gain immediate access to information about potentially relevant drugs being developed at the University of Chicago; to animal models from the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine; and to molecular pathway data generated at the University of Florida. Similarly, investigators from different research centers could pool data across a number of trials, increasing their statistical power and leading to more meaningful results.
The caBIG program "will fundamentally revolutionize the way we can integrate gene expression, genomics, pathology, statistics, and mathematics to get at what is really driving the samples in a particular study," said Robert Clarke, Ph.D., D.Sc., from Georgetown Universitys Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, Washington, D.C. "It will allow us to store and share large amounts of data not just with our collaborators within a particular program, but [also with] the broader scientific community."
Clarke and his research collaborators at Georgetown, Virginia Tech, Catholic University, and the University of Edinburgh look forward to the access caBIG will provide to large tissue banks, where each sample is associated with a fully annotated medical case and linked to definitive data on both pathologic and clinical outcomes.
Building on other biomedical data integration efforts such as NCIs Cancer Molecular Analysis Project, caBIG pilot-phase participants will work in five groups or "workspaces" related to projects or activities with a common focus.
Three so-called "domain workspaces" will produce tools and systems related to clinical trial management, integrative cancer research, and tissue banks and pathology. Two additional "cross-cutting" workspaces will be responsible for defining caBIG data elements and developing system architectural standards.
The first generation of caBIG cancer research tools is expected to be available by the end of this year. Software from the project will be developed and distributed under an open-source license, allowing academic and industry researchers alike to extend the grids capabilities or to use it as a starting point for developing commercial applications.
More than 50 NCI cancer centers have helped shape the vision, approach, and structure for the project since it was announced in July 2003 and now are beginning pilot project activities. Strategy and technology consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton will coordinate day-to-day caBIG operations and logistics, providing funding to project participants through competitive NIH contracts. Other members of the cancer research community and the private sector are free to become involved at any time.
Project leaders hope that as work proceeds on caBIG, it will ultimately grow to form a large community of voluntary participants from both national and international biomedical research fields who are committed to the importance of open and shared bioinformatics tools, standards, infrastructure, and data.
The 3-year pilot phase of caBIG is expected to cost about $60 million, with much of the money supporting grid development activities at participating cancer centers. Although caBIG should have no direct effect on cancer center research budgets or individual research grants, NCI anticipates that the projects potential to eliminate duplicative efforts among the centers may ultimately free up funds that could be used to support individual investigators.
"For us to make the critical achievements that are the next generation of biomedical discovery, we have to be able to integrate this information from bench to bedside," said Buetow. "To bring the information from clinical trials into the context of basic science discovery, we need to effectively and efficiently bring the observations of basic science discovery to the clinicianand to the developmental efforts associated with creating the next generation of cancer treatments and therapies."
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