The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid? (caBIG?) developed by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), helps overcome several critical obstacles to enabling personalized medicine in the 21st century. caBIG? helps leverage large quantities of genomic and clinical data through multidisciplinary, collaborative research to bring new diagnostics and therapeutics to bear on cancer and other diseases, more quickly and potentially at reduced cost, ultimately leading to improved patient outcomes. By implementing a semantically and syntactically interoperable information technology (IT) infrastructure to connect the 60+ NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers to one another and to the broader biomedical community, caBIG? is already having a transformative impact on cancer research in the United States. The caBIG? program is not just a technology stack of software tools but more importantly is a rich community of diverse stakeholders including researchers, clinicians, administrators, patient advocates, and other stakeholders from Government, academia, and industry. Though the NCI designed this program for the purpose of accelerating discovery toward better detection, treatment, and prevention of cancer, it was also designed to be extended to support the same endeavor for other medical conditions. To that end, the NCI has launched a sister initiative called BIG Health, with a purpose to facilitate utilization of caBIG? technology beyond cancer.
