THE PRIORITIES OF THE caBIG® PROGRAM are determined by the communities it is designated to serve, which include dozens of academic and community cancer centers, thousands of scientists and clinical researchers, and countless related organizations that are "stakeholders" in the development of improved prevention, detection, diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring. The caBIG® program was designed first to connect the network of 60+ NCI-designated Cancer Centers and then to link the rest of that larger biomedical cancer community.
In 2008, 50 of the NCI-designated Cancer Centers participated in a process that assessed their biomedical informatics capabilities, their goals for biomedical informatics, and their institutional plans for implementing biomedical informatics. While Cancer Centers are highly diverse in size and scope, they have similar challenges and objectives.
Addressing the Needs of the NCI designated Cancer Centers
The overarching goals of the Cancer Centers include achieving significant advancements in prevention, risk assessment, prediction, prognosis, biomarkers, drug development, and customized therapy for improved health outcomes, via data sharing, analysis, mining and improved regulatory and security processes. Specifically, NCI Cancer Centers seek to:
- Effectively manage the overwhelming volume of data generated by 21st century biomedicine.
- Develop informatics platforms that can leverage genomic, imaging, clinical, and population data to support basic, clinical, and population science.
- Dismantle the existing data exchange barriers to connect and streamline work done in multiple departments, divisions, or between multiple sites in the same institution.
- Increase accuracy through automation of labor-intensive processes.
- Simplify reporting by standardizing data collection and streamlining submission mechanisms.
- Perform complex analysis across multidimensional, multidisciplinary data sets.
- Identify best practices in other institutions.
- Share data among NCI's Clinical Trials Research Programs.
In response to these specific needs, the caBIG® program has developed tools, standards, and information technology infrastructure that address many of these strategic and operational needs, including:
- 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, proteomic, and epigenomic data and integration with clinical data.
- Electronic management of a repository 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.
Figure 1: Cancer research and care is conducted at a large collection of institutions across the United States. A primary goal of the caBIG® program is to connect the 63 NCI-designated Cancer Centers and 16 National Community Cancer Center Program (NCCCP) sites, and community oncology programs into a web of cancer research and care.
