The Nation's Investment in Cancer Research

Building the Right Kind of NCI for the Future

The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid

The technologies of 21st century cancer research are generating virtual mountains of data. As the collection of genomic data becomes the norm in medicine, it will be necessary to confront a wide range of issues, from the protection of patient privacy to the timely sharing of large volumes of research data to the management of clinical trials across many participating institutions. NCI’s cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG^®) came into existence to tackle these and other challenging issues. caBIG^® is, first and foremost, about connections — between NCI researchers, cancer centers, Community Clinical Oncology Program participants involved in clinical trials, cooperative groups that conduct trials on NCI’s behalf, and participants in the NCI Community Cancer Centers Program. It is, in many ways, an internet for cancer research, an organized grid, with strict protections of patient information and carefully monitored access to research data. caBIG^® is also a suite of software applications designed to help manage clinical trials, integrate disparate elements of cancer research, share data, and establish common vocabularies. caBIG^® is also serving as a public model for the development of electronic medical records, which will be a necessity in a data-driven era of medicine.

caBIG^® is not simply an NCI program. It is a collaboration of more than 800 individuals from more than 80 organizations working on a wide variety of projects. That spirit of collaboration is now finding a new and broader home in a bioinformatics grid for healthcare, the BIG Health Consortium™, a recently launched effort to bring together public and private healthcare and information technology leaders, to model new approaches in which clinical care, clinical research, and scientific discovery can be electronically networked.

Speaking to the urgent need for interoperability, Kenneth Buetow, Ph.D., leader of caBIG^®, said, “Personalized medicine is all about information. But for information to be useful, it has to be accessible. What we are doing with caBIG^® is facilitating accessibility through interoperability, essentially creating an environment where information can be exchanged, integrated, and acted upon. The BIG Health Consortium™ is a logical next step, to build upon what we have learned from caBIG^® and broaden our scope, by listening to the most important voices in healthcare.”