News

Staff from CBIIT and NCI, alongside partners from NIH, FDA, and a consortium of scientists from across the world, joined forces to create reference samples and data call sets to help the cancer community further decipher cancer-related gene mutations. Their findings were recently published in Nature Biotechnology.

The latest terminology additions and changes have now been completed in NCI Thesaurus to support CDISC’s Study Data Tabulation Model and implementation guide, a standard model for submitting data from human clinical trials.

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.

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.

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.

NIH’s National Library of Medicine recently released a Request for Information (RFI) on the use of Common Data Elements (CDEs) in the context of research on COVID-19. These comments will be used to inform NIH’s continuing development of guidance on CDE use for COVID-related research. RFI responses are due by May 10, 2021.

Ms. Smita Hastak, M.S., a senior analyst supporting NCI CBIIT, has been elected co-chair of Biomedical Research & Regulation at Health Level Seven International (HL7), an organization that provides standards for the exchange of health information and data.

NIH recently released a notice encouraging NIH-supported clinical programs and researchers to adopt and use U.S. Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) standards. USCDI classifications will ensure clinical data adhere to a unified standard, allowing researchers to more easily compare different data sets and enabling more in-depth analysis to further scientific discovery.

The Metadata Automation DREAM Challenge has closed! Learn more about the winners and how they plan to collaborate together to improve their algorithms and brainstorm future approaches to automating metadata annotation.

Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research (FNLCR) awarded a contract to develop the National Cancer Institute's (NCI's) Cancer Data Aggregator (CDA) to a consortium led by the Broad Institute, Institute for Systems Biology, Seven Bridges Genomics, and General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), Inc. The CDA is a query engine that will help researchers to find, sort, and pull together data from across the NCI Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC), NCI Data Coordinating Centers (DCC), and other repositories.