Transatlantic Cancer Informatics
Early this July, bioinformatics leaders from the United States and the United Kingdom met for the first Joint NCRI Informatics-caBIG™ Conference to share ideas and establish collaborations to accelerate the pace of global cancer research. This two-day conference, held at the Wellcome Trust in London, England, featured speakers and research posters from both caBIG™ and the United Kingdom’s Informatics Initiative, which is sponsored by the National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI). The goals of this conference were to:
- Establish professional connections
- Identify joint research opportunities
- Share best practices
Presentations
Professor Michael Richards, Chairman of the NCRI Board, welcomed the group, and the Director of the NCRI Informatics Initiative, Mr. Robin Clark, opened the conference with an overview of the NCRI Informatics Initiative. NCRI is a UK-based government/philanthropic/industrial partnership that promotes cooperation among the member organizations to develop common plans for cancer research for the benefit of patients, the public, and the scientific community.
The goal of the NCRI’s Informatics Initiative is to maximize the use of research data through the coordination of technical resources and knowledge. The Initiative works closely with other organizations with a similar vision, including caBIG™ and the European Bioinformatics Institute.
In his presentation, Mr. Clark described the Oncology Informatics eXchange (ONIX) platform, a Web-based interface developed by NCRI that will centralize access to cancer research informatics tools, biomedical data, and data services. This Web site will enable scientists and clinicians to more efficiently search for information and resources, and to accelerate development of diagnostics and therapeutics for the benefit of patients. Members of the public will be provided with a single authoritative view of the impact of informatics in support of cancer research in the UK.
Kenneth Buetow, Ph.D., NCI Associate Director for Bioinformatics and Information Technology, provided an overview of caBIG™. Speakers from both the UK and the US presented informatics projects, including tools for imaging, clinical research, tissue banking, data vocabularies, and caGrid services. In many cases, complementary projects were grouped together to highlight synergies between the two national initiatives. For example, Gina Brown, M.D., from The Royal Marsden Hospital, UK, presented a talk on the NCRI Imaging and Pathology Project, followed by a talk by Eliot Siegel, M.D., of the University of Maryland Medical Center, on the caBIG™ In-Vivo Imaging Workspace.
Imaging Collaboration
Maintaining a focus on community and collaboration has been one of the trademarks of caBIG™, and this mission was mirrored at the conference with NCRI. In the area of in vivo imaging, for instance, Professor Phil Quirke from the University of Leeds’ NCRI Imaging and Pathology Project and Dr. Siegel proposed sending members of Professor Quirke’s UK laboratory to visit with Dr. Siegel in the US to discuss potential shared projects in radiology and pathology. The visitors also plan to meet with other institutions involved in imaging technology, such as The Ohio State University, to find ways to learn from each other’s experiences.
Dr. Siegel explained, “The collaboration was not in progress before the conference and was indeed inspired by the presentations and a follow-up meeting at the conference. We talked about a project that would be collaborative with our UK colleagues using the software we’ve developed for the National Cancer Imaging Archive (NCIA) and a subset of their rectal cancer datasets. We’re hoping to move as quickly as possible on this idea.”
Honored Posters:
Winner:
Corrine Ellsworth, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, UK: Globalising the Message of Breast Cancer (A project to globalize breast cancer messages through images accessible to women of all education levels)
Highly Commended:
Archana Sharma-Oates, Philip Quirke, and David R. Westhead, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK: TMADB: A Tissue Microarray Database with an XML Schema for Reporting and Exchanging TMA Data. (An improved method to manage data for high-throughput tissue microarray databases)
Highly Commended:
Adam Butler, The Sanger Institute, UK: COSMIC and Copy Number Integration. (A project that upgrades database features that manage the curation of mutation data on tumors)
Cancer Informatics Posters
Following a call for abstracts on topics relevant to cancer informatics, conference organizers chose abstracts to be presented as posters at the conference. A panel of experts in cancer informatics selected three posters for special recognition (see “Honored Posters”).
Future Joint Conferences
As information technology increases its critical importance to biomedical research, multinational collaborations like the one between NCI and NCRI will play an important role in facilitating more connected and efficient cancer research. Plans are already underway for a second joint NCRI Informatics – caBIG™ conference that will build upon the successes of the first conference.
Dr. Buetow added, “For caBIG™ to realize its complete vision as a ‘World Wide Web’ of cancer research, we must continue to share our technology and collaborate with other groups across the world and with organizations developing informatics solutions for other diseases. These developments are exciting for the research community and important to patients, because as data is shared and analyzed globally, we’re able to bring the world’s greatest research minds together to make real breakthroughs in the fight against cancer and other diseases.”
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