The National Cancer Institute (NCI) will deploy an integrating biomedical informatics infrastructure, the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIGTM), to expedite the cancer research community's access to key bloinformatics platforms. In partnership with the cancer research community, the NCI is creating a common, extensible informatics platform that integrates diverse data types and supports interoperable analytic tools. This platform will allow research groups to tap into the rich collection of emerging cancer research data while supporting their individual investigations. This Integrative Cancer Research Workspace will provide tools and systems to enable integration and sharing of information among cancer researchers. These tools will facilitate the integration of data not only from different centers, but also data of different types, thereby enabling translational and integrative research. These tools also provide for the integration of clinical and basic research data. The Workspace is tasked to develop a well-documented and validated toolset for use throughout the cancer research community. Workspace activities will include platforms and standards to facilitate the sharing of datasets and repositories, and those appropriate for testing the caBIGTM infrastructure are being asked to participate. A major goal of this workspace will be a demonstration of how a shared informatics platform can allow a comprehensive, federated grid of information to be made available to the cancer research community. The main goal of the Integrative Cancer Research Workspace is to assemble data, tools, and infrastructure that facilitate the cross silo use of cancer biology information to promote integrated cancer research. Working towards this goal, the NCICB is developing an integrative application framework, known as calntegrator, designed to facilitate cross data analysis in support of ongoing cancer research. One important bioinformatics database supported by this contract is REpository for Molecular BRAin Neoplasia DaTa (REMBRANDT) that leverages data warehousing technology to host and integrate clinical and functional genomics data from clinical trials involving patients suffering from Gliomas. The knowledge framework will provide researchers with the ability to perform ad hoc querying and reporting across multiple data domains, such as Gene Expression, Chromosomal aberrations and Clinical data. Scientists will be able to answer basic questions related to a patient or patient population and view the integrated data sets in a variety of contexts. Tools that link data to other annotations such as cellular pathways, gene ontology terms and genomic information will be embedded.
