Looking Ahead

The huge human and economic costs of cancer are growing each day, and the need to address these costs has never been greater. The good news is that the number of cancer deaths is decreasing. NCI has been fighting the war on cancer since the 1970s and has made some substantial progress.

For patients and their families who are struggling with this disease or are seeking earlier diagnosis, for researchers and clinicians who need access now to the community’s collective knowledge, and for drug innovators who need to speed the development of life-saving treatments, the NCI has launched this unprecedented effort to share information and connect us all.

In the next 12 to 18 months, we plan to:

• Broaden our community of participants from only the pioneers to many others inside the cancer community and beyond
• Accelerate the adoption of tools, so that more scientists can speed their research towards new discoveries
• Continue to focus on educating those who can benefit from a strong, interconnected informatics system
• Widen the network of interoperable tools, so that even the tools that were developed outside the caBIG™ initiative can be fully connected to maximize productivity.

caBIG™ can transform the broader biomedical research community. By serving as a role model, caBIG™ has the potential to strengthen efforts to combat other diseases beyond cancer, where there are similar needs to integrate vast amounts of molecular and clinical data in order to speed the development of better treatments.