Harnessing the Power of Data-Sharing and Collaboration
GlaxoSmithKline Data Donation Catalyzes New Research Approaches
This May marked a milestone in the growth of the caBIG™ community. GlaxoSmithKline donated microarray data consisting of more than 1,600 hybridizations from more than 300 cell lines to the cancer community through caBIG™. The data donation is a real-life example of how caBIG™ facilitates collaboration to make research faster and more efficient. A primary aim of caBIG™ is to help reduce the cost and time associated with the drug development process. Industry groups estimate that it takes $1 billion and 12–15 years to bring a new drug to market. By encouraging a shift in the culture of biomedical research to one that encourages collaboration and data-sharing between researchers in both industry and academia, caBIG™ aims to reduce that time and expense.
“The donation of this data is a great example of the data-sharing capabilities and the collaborative environment that caBIG™ is designed to foster,” explained Dr. Ken Buetow, Associate Director for Bioinformatics and Information Technology at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). “The quality and quantity of this data will speed research projects on many different types of cancer. And, more importantly, it will lead the way for future public-private partnerships, which are an essential component of the next-generation healthcare delivery system.”
This data donation by GSK—one of the first major donations from the pharmaceutical industry—has been available through caArray since May 9, 2008. caArray is the caBIG™ microarray data management system that enables researchers to easily upload and annotate microarray data. There are more than 30 local installations around the country of caArray currently hosting microarray data, including one at the NCI that contains almost 4,000 separate hybridizations. Many of these installations make that data freely available to researchers. Together, these data sets represent many man-years of laboratory work. By connecting to caBIG™, researchers at different institutions can conduct unique analyses on the same data without repeating previous experiments and can contribute their insights back to the cancer research community, enriching the collective cancer knowledge base and creating a cycle of collaboration.
In addition, by drawing information from much larger data sets than could be produced by any single group, scientists are more likely to see the potential impact of certain treatments and can ask more complex questions about disease progression. As Dr. Juli Klemm, Associate Director of Integrative Cancer Research Products and Programs at the NCI, noted, “Many academic researchers don’t have the resources to produce large and complete datasets like the data donated by GSK. Yet, broader access to such datasets dramatically increases the chances that important findings can be uncovered.”
The Impact of GSK's Data Donation
A number of researchers have already downloaded the dataset donated by GSK, including Dr. Jinghui Zhang, Director of Bioinformatics at NCI Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (NCI CBIIT). Dr. Zhang conducts integrated genomic analyses, studies that support the faster development of targeted, personalized therapies by determining how genetic alterations are associated with various phenotypes, like drug resistance.
Dr. Zhang’s research group is already collaborating with other teams within the NCI who generate the raw data used in her analyses. However, the GSK data covers a much wider variety of cell lines, which will help enable an even better understanding of which variations are associated with various drug responses. Once completed, Dr. Zhang’s results will be made available to the community through the cancer geWorkbench.
According to Dr. Richard Wooster, Director of Translational Medicine Oncology, R&D at GSK, “Cataloguing this type of information in a network like caBIG™ leads to a ready-made understanding of cancer. In turn, we hope that this data will further drive the identification of predictive biomarkers and lead to shorter, more directed clinical trials allowing us to bring drugs through more quickly to patients who need them.”
Dr. Zhang added, “caBIG™ is facilitating the flow of valuable information to create efficiencies across the cancer community. Just as we are using the raw data generated by GSK, other teams will be able to use the use the foundational work done at the NCI as a springboard to new advances in cancer research.”
