Three Dimensions of caBIG® in Action at Moffitt Cancer Center
One of the most comprehensive examples of caBIG® in action is at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute in Tampa, FL, where caBIG® is being leveraged in a variety of ways to help achieve the organization's ambitious goals. Moffitt Cancer Center relies on caBIG® standards to ensure data congruency; applications to support data functions; and interconnectivity made possible through the caGrid network.
Setting Standards for Patient Care. About six years ago, the management team at Moffitt asked a crucial question that would drive much of its informatics strategies for the foreseeable future: How could we integrate information technology into a patient's cancer journey and do so in a way that demonstrates real value? To answer that question, the Moffitt team began by chronicling the different phases of a patient's life to identify those junctures where information gathering is critical. Based on this information, Moffitt developed technology requirements that would enable the collection of data over the course of a patient's clinical encounters that could be accessed by researchers and used to notify patients when there may be new insights on their care. The result of these efforts is the "Total Cancer Care Protocol," which has been active since early 2007.
The Total Cancer Care Protocol at Moffitt defines an approach that combines technology, science and clinical treatment. The Protocol relies on the ability to collect and integrate data from many different sources—from the patient's consent captured on an electronic tablet, to clinical information from a doctor's office, to the lab reports on a particular sample. caDSR (cancer Data Standards Repository) helped form the baseline semantics standards so that all of the data related to the 37,000 patients can be captured, stored, and shared across clinical and research boundaries.
"By standardizing data, caBIG® is helping us create more usable data that gives us more predictive insights," says Dr. David Fenstermacher, Ph.D., executive director of biomedical informatics at Moffitt.
The program is "just starting to get exciting," explains Dr. Fenstermacher. "We are just starting to get the data in place to use bioinformatics to link phenotype and genotype, which opens up all sorts of options to perform more personalized medicine.
Building Capacity through Application Deployment. Through an NCI-funded grant (U56), Moffitt worked in partnership with Ponce School of Medicine in Ponce, Puerto Rico, to determine the best way to address the island's pressing need for a 21st century biorepository. The team's discovery process concluded with the decision to deploy caTissue to create an accessible, island-wide repository for biospecimens.
"We chose caTissue because it was much more affordable for our partners at Ponce than buying commercial tools but, beyond cost considerations, it also gave them an opportunity to participate with the broader cancer community through caGrid," says Fenstermacher.
According to Fenstermacher, bringing Ponce onto the grid later this year will provide other cancer researchers with access to a unique population with genetic and environmental characteristics that would otherwise be unavailable. "The capabilities of caBIG® are helping to make research a much more global endeavor," says Fenstermacher.
Sharing Data on the Network. While Moffitt uses several commercial tools to manage certain aspects of its data, the organization continues to install caBIG® tools so it can contribute to the knowledge of the broader cancer community. "We want to be good citizens and we understand that to do the research we care about, we will need more than the resources at Moffitt," says Fenstermacher. "We need access to and want to contribute to the ready access of large sample sizes so we have adopted the caBIG® data tools we need to do that."
With caArray already installed, Moffitt is ready to share 400 Affymetrix microarrays gathered during a recent study on colorectal cancer. That data will be available over the grid once the study has been published.
