I Data Management, Bioinformatics, and Computational Analysis

Click here to view a map of the Data Coordinating Center (DCC).

The Cancer Genome Atlas Pilot Project will yield an unprecedented amount of information on human clinical biospecimens. The informatics component of TCGA involves developing best ways to collect, store, and distribute the clinical and genomic data generated by the project.

Among the issues that are being considered are: development of data standards and controlled vocabularies for each new technology, establishment of an informatics pipeline for data to flow from production centers to a central repository, creation of portals for basic and clinical researchers to easily access the TCGA data, and encouragement of new computational approaches to analyze the data. Because of issues related to privacy and confidentiality of data, another key function of the TCGA informatics component is to provide a secure access for research and clinical information that are classified as controlled access datasets. 

The TCGA will continue to leverage the resources from the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG™) that has developed the many resources that will be used in the pilot project, such as common data elements, metadata, and middleware to enable interactions among distributed databases. Further, caBIG provides a technical means to support the distribution of data and access to analytical tools for genomic data. This project will include support to underpin the ability to archive and exchange data among the Human Cancer Biospecimen Core Resource, Genome Sequencing Centers and the Cancer Genome Characterization Centers.

Click here for more information on data access.