The NCI Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) is joining the ranks of the 23 international Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) driver projects, working towards responsible, voluntary, and secure sharing of genomic and health-related data. The Data Commons Framework (DCF) previously served as a GA4GH driver project. Now, the driver project has broadened its scope to the CRDC allowing it to bring real-world data and experiences to guide the development of data sharing tools and standards.

The CRDC will collaborate with GA4GH through its functional and technical workstreams, including:

• Genomic Knowledge Standards
• Clinical & Phenotypic data
• Discovery
• Cloud
• Data Use & Researcher Identity (DURI)

NCI members of the CRDC team, including staff from the NCI Cloud Resources, DCF, and the Center for Cancer Data Harmonization, participated in a virtual GA4GH meeting to discuss use cases for and experiences with GA4GH standards.

As part of the DURI workstream (co-led by Dr. Jaime Guidry Auvil), Dr. Vivian Ota Wang presented the NCI Data Access Committee process, illustrating NCI’s use case for managing high volumes of requests for controlled-access data.

Dr. Ian Fore presented at a session on the Federated Analysis Systems Pilot, a project aimed at demonstrating how the products of several GA4GH workstreams work together in an ecosystem. As a component of the National Cancer Data Ecosystem, the CRDC is able to bring a variety of NCI data to the table making it an excellent test case for this pilot. Dr. Fore presented NCI experiences showing how GA4GH standards might allow CRDC data to be combined with data from other sources to impact real-life research.  

Through its participation in GA4GH activities, the CRDC will be able to share its experiences and engage with an international community aligned with the same purpose and vision: to drive discovery through data access, sharing, and analysis.

To learn more about the CRDC as a GA4GH driver project, visit the GA4GH website.