The Cancer Informatics Shared Resource (CISR), a newly reorganized Shared Resource of the Masonic Cancer Center (MCC), provides MCC members with state-of-the-art bioinformatics and clinical informatics services, providing cutting-edge methods, tools, infrastructure, and expert consultations and collaborations to cancer researchers. During the previous period, the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and Institute for Health Informatics (IHI), in consultation with the MCC, recruited Dr. Constantin Aliferis to be the Clinical Research Informatics Officer for the UMN. Under Dr. Aliferis' leadership, health informatics at the UMN has expanded rapidly, leading to organizational restructuring and faculty recruitments. Dr. Aliferis shared the vision witn MCC leadership of integrating Bioinformatics with Medical Informatics. Thus, CISR was created by integrating the MCC's BioInformatics consultation service and the cancer clinical informatics services, formerly known as Oncology Medical Informatics Services (OMIS), with the Institute for Health Informatics the Bioinformatics Consultation Services, while maintaining a cancer-focused informatics subgroup in IHI. This strategic integration will greatly expand the cancer informatics capacity for analyzing large-scale datasets by leveraging the expanded informatics resources the UMN including several high-impact informatics methods development labs, a full range of educational activities (including degree programs and specialized courses), informatics support of high-throughput assays, a secure data environment, and a clinical trial management system. CISR will build upon the past informatics successes to expand and strengthen cancer bioinformatics research development, increase the reach of its consulting service, guide the development of clinical genome informatics, and develop system-wide processes to integrate clinical and genomic data to support translational and clinical research for personalized oncology. In 2016, Professor Jinhua Wang, PhD, a noted computational biologist with a research interest in high- throughput cancer genomics projects, was recruited to Direct CISR. Also new is his direct report, Assistant Professor Ahmad AbuSalah, PhD, who leads the cancer informatics consultation services. Two key Bioinformatics staff, Drs. Aaron Sarver and Nuri Alpay Temiz, were promoted to IHI faculty when CISR formed, and are working closely with Dr. Wang to enhance bioinformatics collaborations and consulting. CISR provides consultation services and expertise critical to the clinical research mission of the MCC in five major areas: 1) cancer genomics and clinical data science and analytics; 2) clinical and genomics data sharing, infrastructure integration, and method development; 3) development of methods for analyzing new genomics technology; 4) education and training on big-data analytics and precision oncology; and 5) clinical trial data management infrastructure and grant data integration. In addition to supporting the administrative needs of the MCC, CISR supports significant database applications used by the Translational Therapy Laboratory (MSC- LIMS) and the Clinical Trials Office (OnCore).
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