Director's Note
Among the myriad issues being addressed by the new Administration in its first 100 days, few have received more attention than information technology, with its unparalleled potential to transform the nation's health care. The importance of IT, and its role in delivering high quality care, is at the forefront as never before.
Looking through the lens of such national attention, we see validation of the central tenet of caBIG®: namely, interoperability. Through caBIG®, we can link together the scientists, clinicians, patients and other participants of life sciences to conduct more dynamic and more successful research. The results of that research can then be translated into improved patient care, and those improved patient outcomes can fuel further research, in a continuous "virtuous" cycle. Research and clinical care can be reunited.
Before moving forward to engage the opportunities of 2009 and beyond, it is worthwhile to highlight just a couple of the accomplishments of the caBIG® community in 2008, which included:
- caBIG® deployment in almost all 60 NCI-designated cancer centers, the NCI's National Community Cancer Center Program (NCCCP), and numerous other research and clinical facilities. caGrid connectivity now enables collaboration and data-sharing within and among institutions.
- The launch of the Enterprise Support Network, a web of resources to help scientists and physicians-as well as their bioinformatics counterparts-adopt and adapt caBIG®, thereby accelerating and increasing the productivity of their work.
Perhaps most exciting were examples of caBIG®-enabled scientific discovery in cancer research, including:
- The identification of three previously unrecognizable mutations occurring in glioblastoma from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), enabled by caBIG® tools. (see the Cancer Molecular Analysis Portal at http://cma.nci.nih.gov )
- The discovery of mutations in a gene that predict a high likelihood of relapse in children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) by a collaborative research team utilizing data from the TARGET (Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments) initiative, facilitated by analysis here at CBIIT using caBIG® tools.
The era of personalized cancer medicine - which promises care that is truly individualized to the nature of each patient's disease - is moving closer each day because of such discoveries. caBIG® infrastructure and tools are the "bricks" in the pathway to get us there.
Sincerely,
Ken Buetow
Director, NCI Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (NCI CBIIT)
