News

NCI's Division of Cancer Biology and IBM Research are hosting an "Ideas Lab" January 24-28, 2022. Cancer researchers, biomedical engineers, and computational experts are invited to team up and help design innovative approaches for modeling combination therapies to combat/treat cancer. The event registration deadline is Monday, November 22.

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 NCI Surveillance Research Program is hosting several webinars in October and November on resources for the analysis of SEER data and other cancer surveillance data. These webinars will include information on SEER*Stat, statistics, variables, methods, and software.

The relaunched monthly CWIG webinar series will invite researchers from across the globe to discuss the latest advancements in cloud computing technologies, workflow, tools, and packages.

Data scientists, cancer biologists, and computational scientists are invited to submit abstracts to the Computational Approaches for Cancer Workshop (CAFCW21). Papers should focus on the application of computational approaches to cancer challenges, and those selected will be presented at the workshop. Abstract submissions are due by Monday, September 13.

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.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has launched the “COVID-19 TOPx” technology sprint to develop digital solutions for the effective collection and reporting of COVID-19 diagnostics data. Data scientists, cancer researchers, and the greater public may provide feedback on these solutions in a live virtual demo on April 1, 2021.

Dr. Juli Klemm, NCI program director and coordinator of NCI’s Informatics Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR) program, and Dr. Jeremy Warner, associate professor of medicine and biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University, recently served as guest editors on a special issue of JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics. The issue features articles describing ITCR tools that are helping to advance cancer research and care.

NCI's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Development Center is now accepting proposals for contracts of interest to the data science field. One topic is aimed at developing cloud-based imaging and multi-omic tools and another is seeking de-identification solutions for NCI's Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC). Applications are due by Monday, October 26, 2020, at 5:00 p.m. ET. A pre-recorded webinar from HHS is available, which explains the 2020 contract Funding Opportunity Announcements for SBIR programs and gives some tips for success.