Director's Note
As 2010 winds down, we are measuring progress against our objectives, assessing how far we've come towards the goal of an interconnected cancer community that facilitates a new generation of oncology research and care.
As always, the caBIG® initiative was organized around three core elements this year:
- A community of stakeholders who share a common desire to improve clinical outcomes and accelerate research discoveries by generating, using and sharing data. This community now comprises:
- 2,300+ participants from more than 700 institutions
- 56 NCI-designated Centers
- 16 Community Cancer Centers
- 1200+ registrants for the 2010 caBIG® Annual Meeting
- 19 licensed Support Service Providers to sustain the biomedical community as they deploy caBIG® tools and technology (a 20% increase vs. June 2010)
- 16 countries using caBIG® tools and technology
- Connectivity among those stakeholders, achieved through a flexible, standards-based information technology infrastructure that facilitates rapid flow of information with appropriate security and privacy protections. Currently, we have:
- More than 70 applications supporting full continuum of biomedical research (10% increase vs. June 2010)
- More than 145 "nodes" connected to the National Grid via caGrid (25% increase vs. June 2010)
- Content, comprised of an expanding collection of biological and clinical data and the resources to collect, aggregate, and analyze it. Currently, researchers can access:
- More than 2.1 million biospecimens searchable through caGrid (82% increase vs. June 2010)
- More than 4.7 million images stored in the National Biomedical Imaging Archive (NBIA) (28% increase vs. June 2010)
- More than 42,000 microarray experiments available for research use on caGrid (60% increase vs. June 2010)
Behind these growing numbers, of course, lies the emerging story of basic and clinical science that caBIG® enables, already reflected in more than 200 publications in the scientific literature.
We look forward to more and more scientific accomplishments in 2011 with the use of caBIG® capabilities—in the meantime, best wishes to everyone in our global community for a happy and healthy New Year!
Ken Buetow, Ph.D.
