Cancer Data Science Pulse

Funding Opportunity for New NCI Informatics Technology for Cancer Research Program Education Resource

National Cancer Institute Informatics Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR)The National Cancer Institute (NCI) recently released a funding opportunity announcement (FOA) for an Informatics Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR) Education Resource (UE5, clinical trials not allowed; RFA-CA-19-042). The ITCR Education Resource will be a new, overarching component of the ITCR program, with the overall mission to conduct activities that engage the research and informatics community to use and extend the ITCR technologies.

The ITCR program currently provides support for informatics resources across the development life cycle, as well as across cancer research domains. The ITCR program recognizes that simply making the tools available to the cancer research community isn’t enough to ensure their adoption and use but additional resources were required beyond the outreach, training, and user support activities conducted by individual ITCR development teams. The ITCR Education Resource is intended to complement and amplify the support conducted by the individual ITCR development teams by addressing:

  • The need to more broadly educate researchers on topics in cancer informatics to enable them to use informatics tools, such as those developed by the ITCR development teams.
  • The ease of use of tools—to promote broader uptake by the cancer research community—by providing guidance and support to informatics tool developers to make their tools as robust and usable as possible.

ITCR Education Resource

The ITCR Education Resource is intended to provide:

  1. In-depth courses and workshops on topics in cancer informatics for cancer researchers using ITCR tools as exemplars
  2. Guidance and support for informatics tool developers within currently funded ITCR development teams to optimize tool usability and user support

Cancer Informatics Courses

The courses in cancer informatics should provide in-depth training in cancer informatics utilizing ITCR tools as exemplars, that cover the breadth of the domains represented by ITCR.  By providing in-depth training in cancer informatics, we hope to enable researchers to better incorporate informatics analyses in their research while simultaneously increasing awareness and dissemination of ITCR tools.

Optimizing Tool Usability and User Support Courses

The courses in optimizing tool usability and user support should provide guidance to ITCR development teams for improving informatics tool usability and user support.  By providing direction in the areas of usability, robustness, maintainability, and utilization, we hope to improve the usability and user support of ITCR tools and therefore increase usage of ITCR tools.

The ITCR Education Resource FOA has a receipt date of December 19, 2019.  Given the multifaceted nature of the proposed ITCR Education Resource, we imagine investigators across institutions may want to partner to bring in diverse expertise to address the overall vision of the ITCR Education Resource. 

 

For more information, please join our pre-application webinar (NOT-CA-19-071) on October 30, 2019, from 2:00 –3:30 p.m. ET (pre-registration through Webex is required) or contact Betsy Hsu at elizabeth.hsu@nih.gov.
Betsy Hsu, Ph.D., MPH
Program Manager, Office of Data Sharing
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