Cancer Immune Monitoring and Analysis Centers and Cancer Immunologic Data Center (CIMAC-CIDC) Network

About the CIMAC-CIDC Network

The CIMAC-CIDC Network is a space for clinical investigators to design and perform clinical studies in cancer immunotherapy. The CIMAC-CIDC Network uses validated, harmonized, and standardized assays to generate comprehensive immune profiling data to identify biomarkers of response, resistance, and toxicity in immunotherapy trials. If you’re a CIMAC-CIDC Network member, it also provides data integration across modalities through the CIDC.

If you’re an investigator who’s not part of the CIMAC research group, you can still access the data. Data sharing is a key tenet of the Cancer MoonshotSM Initiative, and by extension the CIMAC-CIDC Network. However, because there are a variety of clinical trials that collaborate with the CIMAC-CIDC Network, data sharing is complicated.

Data sharing is associated with many regulatory and contractual obligations, such as Cooperative Research and Development Agreements and Human Material Transfer Agreements and is made particularly complicated in this instance due to the varied clinical trials that collaborate with the CIMAC-CIDC Network. Each of these trials may have different agreements and contracts in place that span the private and public sector, all of which define the timeline and extent to which researchers can share data.

Within the contractual agreements, CIMAC-CIDC Network Partnership for Accelerating Cancer Therapies (PACT) members also access the CIMAC-CIDC network data for their own drug development efforts.

The CIMAC-CIDC Network collaborates with stakeholders—across NCI, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Foundation for NIH—to navigate these requirements and share the data with the broader research community, so that you can use the shared data to fuel future discoveries and advancements in immuno-oncology.

NCI’s Role 

The CIMAC-CIDC Network is part of the Cancer Moonshot initiative. There are several NCI partners that support the CIMAC-CIDC Network. They play different roles during the life cycle of the clinical trials. By providing necessary tools and infrastructure, NCI enables the cancer community to come together to produce a standardized set of clinical data elements across trials, assay data, and informatics tools that are essential for cross trial analysis.

Some of NCI’s roles include:

  1. ensuring program management of the network.
  2. sharing files from the CIDC portal to secure, dbGaP-registered data sharing repositories. The data files from CIMAC-CIDC correlative studies include several types of data (such as assay data from CIMACs, assay data users have analyzed through CIDC bioinformatics pipelines, and clinical data from clinical trials).
  3. ensuring that shared data are associated with a particular published manuscript. 
  4. reviewing the metadata, which you can submit yourself. dbGaP curators work with the principal investigators and play an essential role in providing the final form of the dbGaP page.
  5. making sure that data sharing follows the terms or the agreements/policies of NCI’s Cancer Moonshot, National Clinical Trials Network, and the Human Material Transfer Agreement, as well as cooperative research and development agreements.
  6. providing standard operating procedures and analytical performance. This is the NCI Biospecimen Research Database’s role, and they also validate reports for CIMAC assays. 

The branches and offices of NCI’s Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) also play a role in this network.

  • The Clinical and Translational Research Informatics Branch (CTRIB) supports and manages CIDC. In coordination with CBIIT’s Computational Genomics and Bioinformatics Branch (CGBB), CTRIB leads the activities for the Cancer Immune Monitoring and Analysis Centers (CIMACs).
  • CGBB builds, updates, and enhances CIDC bioinformatics pipelines. CGBB also carries out CIMAC-CIDC network data analysis by running the pipelines to ensure the project’s ongoing success and data integrity.
  • The Office of Data Sharing’s Genomic Program Administrator is responsible for registering studies and coordinating study releases for data sharing.
  • Although the CIMAC-CIDC Network is a closed network, CBIIT supports the public data sharing by utilizing the NCI Cancer Research Data Commons to share the data with general research community as permitted by NCI policies and network agreements.

Connecting the Cancer Community

If you’re interested in using resources or accessing information affiliated with this network, here are a few ways to get started:

  • Download clinical data templates: Use the available resources to learn how to standardize clinical data elements and specimen for the network.
  • Access data: The network data are available on dbGaP; just submit a data access request (DAR). New to dbGaP? You’ll need eRA credentials.

For questions about CIMAC-CIDC data sets and bioinformatics pipelines, please email the CIDC Administrators.

Additional Information

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