caBIG® has connected 50 NCI-designated Cancer Centers into a national network (caGrid) to create the world's largest biomedical research "highway." (See your Center at http://cagrid-portal.nci.nih.gov/web/guest/home.)
Connecting the Community
caBIG® was conceived, designed, and developed in partnership with the NCI-Designated Cancer Centers to solve basic and clinical research challenges through the use of state-of-the-art information technology, and to create an interoperable infrastructure to eliminate data disconnects that have traditionally slowed the pace of translational research.
Fostering Growth
A structured deployment process was begun in 2007 to help participating centers "Get Connected" to caBIG®. Deploying Centers receive resources and support to achieve caBIG® interoperability by adopting caBIG® tools and infrastructure, or by adapting existing systems to be caBIG®-compatible. Teams from the Cancer Centers and their communities continue to be actively involved in the ongoing development of caBIG® tools and resources.
Enhancing Capabilities
Today, those Centers use caBIG® to achieve some or all of the following critical functions:
- Electronic management of biorepositories from sample collection to dissemination and search/query
- Electronic management of clinical trials from protocol development through regulatory submission
- Electronic management of molecular studies of genomic and epigenomic data and integration with clinical data
- Electronic management of in vivo images and integration of images with clinical and genomic data
- Development of standards-based data models, controlled vocabularies and common data elements for multiple scientific domains that simplify data exchange and facilitate integrative analysis across multidimensional data sets.
- Data connectivity among Cancer Centers, technically via caGrid and procedurally through the Data Sharing and Security Framework that addresses legal, regulatory, policy, and proprietary barriers to data exchange
About the NCI-Designated Cancer Centers
The NCI Cancer Centers Program supports a national network of 63 NCI-designated Cancer Centers that are engaged in collaborative, multi-disciplinary research to prevent, treat, and cure cancer. While Cancer Centers are highly diverse in size and scope, they have similar challenges and objectives. Their overarching goals include achieving significant advancements in risk assessment, prediction, prognosis, biomarkers, drug development, and customized therapy for improved clinical outcomes, via data sharing, analysis, mining and improved regulatory and security processes. To learn more about the NCI-Designated Cancer Centers Program, click here.
