The Cancer Informatics Core was established to meet the growing needs for informatics and computational support for high throughput biomedical research at a systems biology level. The goal of this core is to facilitate biomedical and translational research at Moffitt by providing methods and tools to record, integrate, manage, analyze and visualize various biomedical, behavioral and clinical data, as well as analyzing data, and deploying caBIG tools to share results with the cancer research community. Services provided include consultation, data mining, data integration, data analysis, database development, web application development, computational tool development, and user training. Such services penetrate the whole process of research projects: initial consultation and data mining that assists in the formation of research hypotheses and preparation of grant application;assisting with experimental design;developing informatics tools to collect and manage heterogeneous data;integrating laboratory data with clinical, behavioral and biological data;performing data analysis and manuscript preparation. The core supports other core facilities by developing databases and tools for computation, visualization and annotation of experimental data. The third type of services involves implementing caBlG infrastructure and application tools so that researchers can share data readily with other cancer centers that implemented the same informatics infrastructure. Training investigators to use informatics and computational tools is also a key service. Since the last review, the core has undergone significant growth under new leadership and has supported numerous research projects for faculty in basic biomedical research, drug discovery, population science and experimental therapeutics. The core also enhanced or developed many tools for searching, analyzing or visualizing proteomics data for the Proteomics Core, and implemented computational pipelines for microarray data processing and quality control for the Molecular Genomics Core. Applications within the caBIG toolset, including caArray, caTissue, caGWAS and GenePattern, have been installed. The Core requests CCSG Support of $291,002, which is 12% of its operational budget. 90% of usage has supported Moffitt members with the remaining 10% for development of infrastructure and development for other cores.
The Cancer Informatics Core plays a critical role in the research activities of Moffitt investigators. With the advancement and adoption of high-throughput technologies in increasingly complex biomedical research, biomedical informatics support is essential. Dedicated and ad hoc consultations have been conducted for faculty members preparing grant proposals. Such early involvement helps investigators form clear hypotheses, design cost-effective experiments, and plan complex data management and analysis strategies
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