News

Keep up with the latest news from the NCI Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) and the data science communities.

NIH needs input on potential updates to the NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy! As a researcher or data scientist, share your perspective related to cancer genomic data to help the policy keep pace with evolving scientific opportunities and stakeholder expectations. Responses to the Request for Information will be accepted through February 28, 2022.

In a recent podcast, NCI leaders from CBIIT and the Small Business Innovation Research Development Center shared how technological developments have enhanced cancer research and have helped usher in new diagnostics, treatments, and patient care.

Dr. Jill Barnholtz-Sloan, CBIIT’s associate director of Informatics and Data Science and DCEG senior investigator, together with research colleagues, used a direct data matching approach to compare brain tumors in U.S. Veteran and non-Veteran populations. The study indicates that direct and deterministic data matching approaches have the potential to compare the distribution of tumors, treatment trajectories, and clinical outcomes of other cancers and rare diseases among these populations.

CBIIT Director, Dr. Tony Kerlavage, along with NCI staff and a host of experts in childhood cancer research, recently published an article, “Cancer Informatics for Cancer Centers (CI4CC): Scientific Drivers for Informatics, Data Science, and Care in Pediatric, Adolescent, and Young Adult (AYA) Cancer,” in JCO Cancer Clinical Informatics. The article summarizes the Fall 2020 CI4CC Symposium and showcases the scope of initiatives underway to address childhood cancer, with a particular emphasis on how data science and informatics are helping to support these initiatives.

Interested in developing new, creative data visualization techniques to facilitate cancer research? If so, apply by Wednesday, September 8, to participate in NCI’s next DataViz + Cancer Innovation Lab!

Cancer researchers and data scientists can extract terms from the NCI Thesaurus (NCIt) and generate reports to show how those terms align with other standardized vocabularies with NCI’s new Report Exporter application.

Find terms from the NCI Thesaurus (NCIt) to include in your cancer research study, or learn what that term means for your data analysis, with a new browser, called EVS Explore. This tool builds on existing functionality available through the EVS Application Programming Interface and offers cancer researchers and data scientists a new, faster option for searching NCIt’s standardized cancer data.

NIH released this RFI to inform the development of consent language for data and biospecimen sharing.

NCI Director Dr. Ned Sharpless and CBIIT Director Dr. Tony Kerlavage recently published an article, “The Potential of AI in Cancer Care and Research,” which takes stock of current advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning and outlines some of the areas NCI hopes to explore in greater depth in the future.

Attending the second week of the 2021 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting? Here are a few event sessions you won’t want to miss to learn more about the latest NCI data science, data commons, and cancer research activities.