Director's Update: October 21, 2003
In cancer research today, thousands of scientists across a myriad of scientific disciplines are striving to understand the biology of cancer and apply their discoveries to the development of new, effective interventions for this complex disease. Utilizing leading-edge and high-throughput technologies, these scientists are developing novel scientific research tools and are generating immense volumes of valuable information. The potential power of these rich collections of information can be fully realized by enabling individual investigators and research teams to combine and leverage their findings and expertise across the cancer research community.
To address this critical need, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) is creating a biomedical informatics network that will connect teams of cancer investigators, their data, and their tools for discovery. The initiative will enable research teams to pursue new collaborative efforts while supporting the needs and contributions of individual investigations. This initiative is called the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, or caBIG, and is being coordinated by NCI's Center for Bioinformatics.
NCI launched the initial phase of caBIG this summer by sponsoring information seminars that engaged more than 100 participants from NCI Cancer Centers. In addition, five teams of scientists and information technology experts visited with staff at 49 Cancer Centers who volunteered to discuss in greater detail their informatics strengths, needs, and potential contributions. These visits, completed in just over a month, were instrumental in shaping and prioritizing the informatics-related issues that caBIG will seek to address. Cancer Center staff who participated in the initial phase of caBIG expressed great enthusiasm for the project as well as for the unique effort to actively gather community input to help design, develop, and deploy the project.
Through these discussions, the scientists and technology experts were able to identify unique capabilities for data accrual, integration, and analysis that exist within the Cancer Center community as well as define areas of critical need. To address these issues, a multi-center project oriented approach will be implemented. This will require the establishment of "workspaces" where the skills and resources present within the Cancer Center research community will be matched with research teams who can benefit from sharing their data with other researchers.
Within each workspace, Cancer Centers will be funded to develop new data-management applications as well as adapt existing analytical research tools. The NCI is supporting and coordinating further development, piloting, and refining of these tools, which ultimately will be made available to the research community through the grid. Additional Cancer Centers will work within the workspaces to bring these tools into their respective organizations. Each workspace will interface with a working group of experts (including statisticians, clinicians, biologists, and computer scientists) - with membership open to the community - to obtain ongoing input and to chart future directions. There will also be workspaces focused on common issues - for example, vocabularies, data standardization, and software architecture. A strategic planning group will also be established to help identify additional priority areas.
As further consensus is achieved in the Cancer Center research community regarding management of biomedical informatics, and the feasibility of the pilot effort is demonstrated, new workspaces will be developed and implemented to include additional Cancer Centers, Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPOREs), new NCI research initiatives, and intramural NCI research programs.
Upon successful completion of the pilot effort, caBIG will leverage national cancer-related research capabilities and data resources and make cancer research collaborations easier to initiate and complete. These activities are scientifically essential, cost-effective, and will accelerate efforts to understand and treat cancer, leading to better prognoses for cancer patients.
I invite you to visit the caBIG Web site to stay current with the progress and activities of this exciting new initiative.
Andrew C. von Eschenbach, M.D.
Director, National Cancer Institute
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