The Cancer Research Informatics Shared Resource Facility (CRI SRF) serves as a Markey Cancer Center (MCC)-managed resource that develops and applies informatics methods and technologies to enable the advancement of science through the curation and open investigator access to high quality data from a wide variety of institutional sources. CRI has expanded MCC's data ecosystem to cover MCC's entire catchment area of Kentucky through linkages and integration with high quality population-based data from the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) Kentucky Cancer Registry. Enhanced and expanded through CCSG support and implementing changes recommended from the last CCSG review, the CRI has been highly innovative in the provision of comprehensive informatics services readily available to cancer center investigators. Services are broadly categorized into: 1) provision of integrated data from the patient-centric cancer research data warehouse; 2) research in clinical decision support for MCC's Molecular Tumor Board; 3) high-performance computing (HPC) and big data storage support for bioinformatics analyses and machine learning approaches to natural language processing (NLP); 4) data management to ensure complete and accurate clinical trial and biospecimen data; 5) automated screening of eligible patients for clinical trial recruitment; 6) identification and annotation of human biospecimens; 7) software and database development for research and data dissemination; 8) informatics support for study planning and grant preparation; and 9) mentorship, training and education. CRI services have been utilized by 103 MCC members, 55 of whom (53%) are peer-reviewed funded members. CRI infrastructures and data management applications enable efficient interactions among the Research Programs and other SRFs such as a portal for basic science researchers to access bioinformatics analysis results. CRI develops and supports critical informatics technologies in databases, data warehousing, NLP, deep phenotyping, HPC, mobile device apps, data sharing and data dissemination. CRI closely coordinates the acquisition and provision of institutional informatics resources in collaboration with the University of Kentucky (UK) Institute for Biomedical Informatics, the UK Center for Clinical and Translational Science, UK HealthCare Information Technology and the UK Center for Computational Sciences. CRI has established strategic alliances with informatics centers of excellence and national agencies to enhance Kentucky data and to collaboratively develop informatics tools and data standards serving the greater cancer research community. In addition, CRI faculty and staff serve as national informatics leaders in cancer data exchange standards and innovative software applications adopted across the United States. CRI is led by Dr. Eric B. Durbin (CP) and is tightly integrated with the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics; Biospecimen Procurement and Translational Pathology; and Oncogenomics SRFs through the provision of essential informatics services that enhance the other MCC SRF service offerings.
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