Development on a Dime
Fox Chase Cancer Center is reusing resources to accelerate cancer research
At Fox Chase Cancer Center, researchers are working to speed the delivery of new therapies to patients—but how do you accelerate cancer research on a limited budget?
"We've tried to figure out a way to be more efficient about how we deploy new information systems, and that approach has allowed us to support more investigators with fewer resources," explains Michael Collins, Director of Research Informatics at Fox Chase. "When we don't have to build everything from scratch, we can get a lot more done."
To that end, Collins and his team are combining open source software—including caBIG® applications and services—with in-house development efforts to create tools that meet the needs of research staff at the Center.
The Fox Chase Approach in Action
A key competency at Fox Chase is population science, which frequently requires information systems to manage the collection and analysis of massive amounts of survey data from study participants.
"We used to treat these requests as one-off projects that we built from scratch, but about five years ago we decided to look at all of the systems we had developed and figure out a way to reuse them," notes Collins. "Our job, I think, is increasingly more about data integration and less about building the information system specifically for an investigator or for a facility."
With that goal in mind, Collins and his team created the Population Research Application Generation Environment (PRESAGE) to help rapidly develop and deploy web-based tools to support population-based studies. Using PRESAGE, researchers can quickly gain access to the tools they need to run and manage studies, track biospecimens, access surveys, and manage study events and participants. Among other open source resources, the tool has leveraged common vocabulary elements from caDSR, the Cancer Data Standards Repository. PRESAGE is currently in use by more than 223 investigators and research staff at the institution.
Open Source Software Leveraged by Fox Chase
Software | Capability |
---|---|
Caisis Developed by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center |
Clinical research data management |
caArray Developed by caBIG® |
Gene expression data management |
caTissue Developed by caBIG® |
Biospecimen management |
ScreenSaver Developed by The Harvard Medical School |
High throughput screening data management |
What Reuse Hath Wrought
Other researchers at Fox Chase are conducting "translational science": unlocking the mysteries of cancer on the molecular level, and "translating" those findings into clinical applications. This approach requires the ability to connect data generated from population, medical, and basic scientific research. And, more and more frequently, it also requires collaboration with external partners.
Translational research efforts within the institution and among collaborating organizations are supported by a web-accessible data warehouse which acts as the hub for all research and clinical data generated at the Center, thereby providing researchers with access to information ranging from cytogenetics, biospecimen availability and genetic testing data to electronic medical records, family health history and tumor registry information. With these data, researchers can quickly identify biospecimens of interest or potential patient cohorts that will support their investigations.
"In the past, a subject expert would need to manually build datasets that combined multiple variables from multiple spreadsheets, and then hand them off to statisticians to do their analysis. Now, they can literally "drag and drop" to build their datasets, and they can more quickly identify cohorts and potential study participants, so it helps them create their grant proposals and publish more papers," explains Dr. Eric Ross, Assistant Vice President for Biometrics and Information Sciences.
Fox Chase and caBIG®
Collins and Ross hope to incorporate more caBIG® resources into these development efforts in the coming years.
"We're excited about the current services-oriented approach that caBIG® is taking. We are using services as much as possible, as they allow us to assemble new systems quickly. It has worked well for us in the past—so hopefully, the more services that are available from the NCI, the better off we're all going to be."