The National Cancer Institute, Division of Cancer Prevention?s Cancer Biomarkers Research Group has negotiated an Interagency Agreement with NASA?s Jet to design, build, implement and maintain an Informatics Infrastructure to support scientific discovery, development and validation of cancer biomarkers for the Early Detection Research Network (EDRN). Propulsion Laboratory Scientific discovery in biomedical research increasingly depends on mining and correlating diverse data sets from various resources. The Early Detection Research Network (EDRN) of NCI engages scientists of multiple disciplines across 30 research centers in a collaborative research of cancer biomarker. The distributed nature of the EDRN represents a modern challenge for building a bioinformatics infrastructure to capture and distribute science and ancillary data within the network. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), one of the key players of the EDRN Informatics Working Group, has been leading the ongoing effort in architecting and implementing such a biomedical data management and delivery infrastructure. Our first application focused on providing a common informatics framework for accessing heterogeneous specimen repositories located at participating EDRN sites. This task plan continues to evolve that infrastructure by moving towards delivery of an end-to-end cancer research platform. One key component will be the EDRN Catalog and Archive Service (eCAS), which supports the capture and distribution of the published science data acquired during a validation study. In addition, we will continue to evolve the EDRN Resource Network Exchange as a virtual system for sharing specimen information. The infrastructure will satisfy EDRN informatics goals including: i) a common information model for describing EDRN science data; ii) acquisition of science data published from multiple EDRN participating sites remotely; iii) software interfaces for sharing of data across biomedical applications; iv) secure transfer and distribution of data to the science community; v) a web-based interface to search and download EDRN science products.
