Director's Note
To Friends and Colleagues:
In recent years, a wide spectrum of observers in the healthcare space have noted that a key accomplishment of the caBIG® initiative has been its success in building "community." I believe they meant that people from different disciplines, different professions, and different types of organizations all found common cause in creating and using an infrastructure that would enable a new generation of science.
Today, it appears that community remains paramount, and that from a few hundred individuals who developed caBIG® in the earliest days, we have evolved into a global "online village" in which skills, expertise, resources, and data are being shared 24/7/365. This issue of LINKS reflects that continued spirit.
In England, they've developed new capabilities for caArray that enable their fellow researchers to manage legacy molecular data sets with ease, while ensuring caBIG® interoperability. At our In Silico Centers in six U.S. cities, it's about novel research methods that expand our understanding of the underlying causes of some of the deadliest forms of cancer.
I'm writing this note from Israel, where approximately one hundred researchers and clinicians from four Israeli universities and numerous medical centers have gathered to discuss the cancer genome and the integration of clinical and molecular data to drive new knowledge (note: the workshop started with a description of caBIG® and its capabilities!). Last week, I chatted with senior leaders in South Africa who have an interest not only in moving their nation's cancer enterprise into the digital age, but potentially doing so with caBIG® -enabled connectivity among all their researchers and clinicians. This month, we will share two days in an annual conference with our colleagues from the United Kingdom's National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) to delineate new approaches to research challenges in this decade. And this summer, we expect researchers at the Aga Khan University in Pakistan to start clinical trials using the caBIG® clinical trials suite.
caBIG®-enabled connectivity keeps the cancer research "village" linked across time, space, sectors, culture, and language so that we can fight cancer more effectively. It remains, of course, our proudest accomplishment.
Ken Buetow, Ph.D.
