CANCER INFORMATICS CORE SHARED RESOURCE: PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The Cancer Informatics Core (CIC) was established to meet the growing needs for informatics support of biomedical research. The overall objective of the core is to facilitate biomedical and translational research at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Massey Cancer Center (MCC) by providing methods and tools to record, integrate, manage, analyze, and visualize various biomedical, behavioral, and clinical data. This objective is met by providing high-quality informatics services through innovative systems developed to access and analyze MCC and VCU biomedical data. CIC services include consultation, data integration and honest broker services, feasibility assessment, and cohort identification. These services rely on the CIC Universal Data Store (UDS), which consists of linked data from VCU Health?s various clinical-related data systems including electronic medical records (EMR), scheduling, billing, and claims systems, as well as data from the VCU Cancer Registry and the Bone Marrow Transplant Registry. The CIC staff use off-the-shelf tools when possible, as well as innovative custom-built applications to perform their research-related services. Custom- built systems include analyst toolsets for navigating the data in the Massey Data Analysis System (MDAS) and the Clinical Trials Eligibility Database (CTED) software suite, which grew out of the commercially unmet need for a clinical trials patient identification and screening tool. These tools are based on community standards, are designed for interoperability, extensibility and scalability, and follow the highest standards with respect to patient security and privacy. CIC?s most frequent users are investigators from MCC?s clinical trial enterprise requesting feasibility assessments and patient cohort identifications. CIC closely collaborates with the Biostatistics Shared Resource on study design and data quality monitoring, as well as on bioinformatics projects. The CIC routinely supports the Tissue and Data Acquisition and Analysis Core (TDAAC) by regularly providing annotations for the banked biospecimens and by supporting a dynamic inventory dashboard. To support MCC?s efforts in precision medicine, the CIC closely collaborates with bioinformaticians at the Center for Clinical and Translational Research and the VCU Clinical Genomics Laboratory. In CY2015, the CIC expertise was utilized in 130 research projects involving members from all 4 research programs. The supported projects were led by 36 investigators. The CIC is directed by Tamas S. Gal, PhD, and is supported by 6 FTEs. The CIC is an MCC-managed resource. Employees are available for consultation by appointment between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM, Monday through Friday. Certified users have access to CIC's online resources 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. CIC services add value to the research of MCC members as the services cannot practically obtained through alternative vendors.
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