News

In this JAMA Oncology Viewpoint opinion article, Dr. Jill Barnholtz-Sloan, NCI’s associate director for Informatics and Data Science, discusses NCI’s large-scale data sharing and access efforts. She also stresses that as we continue to generate cancer data, free and open scientific data should be treated as a public good.

The Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research’s Laboratory of Human Retrovirology and Immunoinformatics has updated its bioinformatics resource system known as DAVID. The system provides investigators with a set of functional annotation tools to better understand the biological meaning behind large lists of genes.

Two breast cancer imaging data collections have recently been released and made publicly available by The Cancer Imaging Archive. Together, these two collections comprise the first subgroup of publicly released imaging data from the I-SPY2 clinical trial.

Dr. Peng Jiang of NCI’s Center for Cancer Research Cancer Data Science Lab and his postdocs have developed an open-source computational tool called the tumor-resilient T cell (Tres) model. Tres analyzes gene activity in T cells to assess how those cells are likely to fare in an immunosuppressive environment.

Read about the latest NCI and Department of Energy workshops focused on advancing computational approaches for predictive radiation oncology. Next steps include addressing the unmet needs in radiation oncology and cancer research and aligning NCI-DOE project goals with the convergence of radiation therapy and advanced computing.

NCI’s Childhood Cancer Data Initiative has launched an inventory of childhood cancer data sets, repositories, and resources for investigators and data scientists alike.

Updates to NCIt, NCIm, and other terminologies/ontologies have been published and are now available. These resources, managed and maintained by NCI CBIIT’s Enterprise Vocabulary Service Team, promote harmonization and shared data standards. This latest update includes new data terms for the Pediatric Cancer Data Commons and the Integrated Canine Data Commons.

On April 15, 2022, NCI’s Surveillance Research Program released the latest Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) data based on November 2021 data submissions. As a cancer researcher or data scientist, discover how you can access these cancer statistics and data for your research and analysis.

Help the FDA’s National Center for Toxicological Research and the precisionFDA optimize data processing pipelines for identifying indels (i.e., insertions/deletions in a genome) in oncopanel sequencing datasets by participating in a sequencing data challenge. Pre-register for the “Indel Calling from Oncopanel Sequencing Data Challenge” before May 2, 2022! Selected participants will be publicly recognized and invited to contribute to a scientific manuscript and a “Top Performer Webinar” that will be open to the public.

IMPROVE focuses on improving deep learning models to predict the efficacy of cancer treatments. The research community, including data scientists and informaticists, is asked to respond to an RFI for creating protocols to evaluate model performance by April 15, 2022, at 5:00 p.m. ET. Additionally, they are encouraged to respond to an RFP for improving model comparison by May 9, 2022.