caBIG® and the NCI Office of Cancer Genomics
The mandate of the Office of Cancer Genomics (OCG) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) is to enhance understanding of the molecular mechanisms of cancer, with the ultimate goal of improving the prevention, early detection, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer.
Specifically, the OCG:
- Provides information, technology, methods, informatics tools, and reagents to serve the needs of the cancer research community
- Manages the following research programs:
- Establishes and maintains relationships with advisory groups for each of the above programs
- Develops educational resources for the general public
All of the OCG’s programs are intended to generate and disseminate genomic data for use by the research community. To maximize the value and timeliness of the megabytes of such data, OCG is coordinating with caBIG® to ensure user-friendly, systematic access to each program’s data for researchers; semantic interoperability – that is, to have all users agree on terminology so that experimental results are interpretable in a consistent, unambiguous way; and software tools that can be adopted or further developed.
Following are details on how caBIG® supports one particular OCG program—TCGA:
The Cancer Genome Atlas and the Cancer Molecular Analysis Portal
One of the biggest challenges to researchers of high throughput genomics technologies is how to collect and work with the large quantities of diverse experimental data. The caBIG®–enabled Cancer Molecular Analysis (CMA) Portal (http://cma.nci.nih.gov) provides powerful tools and resources that enable cancer researchers across the world to explore, visualize, and integrate genomic characterization, sequencing, and clinical data from a variety of data sets.
The Portal exemplifies the caBIG® core principles of open development and federation. The CMA Portal allows researchers to use analysis programs developed at three different organizations, and to access data produced by more than 10 different institutions, all by a unified web interface. The tools available on CMA Portal allow researchers to access clinical characteristics such as survival data and tumor staging, and correlate those with mutation and other genomic data. This capability enables researchers to conduct cross-platform queries, helping them to find correlations between research and clinical data that would be difficult, if not impossible, to find using conventional means.
The first data set accessible from the CMA Portal is from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). TCGA is a comprehensive and coordinated effort to improve understanding of the molecular basis of cancer through the application of genome analysis technologies, including large-scale genome sequencing. TCGA is an integrative, multidisciplinary effort to develop and assess a framework for systematically identifying and characterizing the genomic changes associated with three cancer types: glioblastoma multiforme, squamous cell carcinoma of the lung, and serous cystadenocarcinoma of the ovary. Together, TCGA and CMA advance the opportunities for scientists and clinicians to analyze and employ TCGA data, to develop a new generation of targeted diagnostics, therapeutics, and preventives for cancer, and pave the way for more personalized cancer medicine.
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