Cancer Data Science Pulse

There has been a lot of press in the past couple of months about the "Cancer Moonshot," first mentioned by Vice President Joe Biden in October 2015, and gaining steam recently with the President's State of the Union address and an initial recommendation of $1 billion of funding. The White House released a Fact Sheet highlighting the exciting and transformative goals of the Moonshot.

We have all been hearing about the benefits of cloud computing for a long time now. At the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB), we believe that 2016 is the year in which a cloud-based approach will truly become "the new normal" for cancer research.

As the FY 2017 Annual Plan and Budget Proposal describes, some of the key components of the infrastructure and programs that comprise the National Cancer Program include:

My previous post highlighted how the imaging community is leveraging NCIP Hub's capabilities to run its image analysis needs and to collaborate on tool development. This post discusses how the NCI plans to use NCIP Hub to address the need for robust, reliable translational use of mouse and human-in-mouse models.

Researchers are using 3D printing to gain insights that contribute to advances in basic biomedical research and the development of precision medical therapies by creating 3D models of pathogens, tumors, normal tissues, cells, and biomolecules. Dr. Sriram Subramaniam, principal investigator in the Laboratory of Cell Biology at the NCI Center for Cancer Research (CCR), uses 3D printing as both an educational and a research tool.

As a scientific repository, the NCIP Hub can store community-generated data, tools, and other resources. Members can upload tools, conduct analyses, and collaborate, giving researchers the opportunity to engage with and leverage each other's expertise.

The NCIP Hub is designed to support the changing bioinformatics needs of our community and move towards a vision of an informatics marketplace for cancer researchers.

To the Cancer Informatics Community,

While working with big genomics data can be very challenging, it can also be fun. And when your team wins a competition, it's positively exhilarating, as our NCIP Computational Genomics Research Group discovered while participating in the 8th annual set of challenges posed by The Dialogue on Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods (DREAM) project.