News

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) are recruiting postdoctoral fellows for the Big Data Scientist Training Enhancement Program (BD-STEP) to broaden our capacity to apply data-driven findings to cancer research through the support of healthcare-focused data science training.

The NCI Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) launched a new website, datacommons.cancer.gov, for data scientists, informaticists, and researchers to explore, learn, and engage with the CRDC and its resources.

To improve understanding of the risk and protective factors in the Veteran population, the VHA Innovation Ecosystem is utilizing the precisionFDA platform to call upon the public to develop machine learning and artificial intelligence models to predict health outcomes using synthetic Veteran health records.

On May 1, 2020, the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) precisionFDA launched "Truth Challenge V2: Calling Variants from Short and Long Reads in Difficult-to-Map Regions." Participants may join this challenge to assess variant-calling pipeline performance on a common frame of reference consisting of difficult-to-map regions, segmental duplications, and the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC). The submission period is open until June 15, 2020.

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.

NCI's Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) has new data from the HIV+ Tumor Molecular Characterization Project (HTMCP).

NCI’s Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) has added new data sets from NCI’s Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Center (CPTAC), a national effort to accelerate the understanding of cancer’s molecular basis through large-scale proteome and genome analysis (a.k.a. proteogenomics). 

NIH's Common Fund recently issued Notices of Intent to Publish Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs) for its new program, Harnessing Data Science for Health Discovery and Innovation in Africa (DS-I Africa). In addition, NIH is hosting a DS-I Africa Virtual Symposium Platform as part of this new program's launch that will include information about the FOAs and engage participants in robust scientific sessions that examine the state of data science in Africa.

The NCI Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) is joining the ranks of the 23 international Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) driver projects. As a driver project, the CRDC will bring real-world data and experiences to guide the development of data sharing tools and standards.

An Ideas Lab is an intensive 5-day program for 30 participants (with a range of expertise and experience) to deepen their shared understanding of a complex challenge, redefine the problems within the challenge, and generate innovative ideas for research proposals. This Ideas Lab will focus on the creation of "digital twin technology."