Bioinformatics Project Streamlines Data Exchange

Extract

New investigative methods and technologies are yielding information about cancer and its treatment at an overwhelming pace, making it difficult for researchers to build on advances from gene and protein studies, clinical trials, and other work. At present, there is no common mechanism for cancer researchers or research institutions to easily share data and no common standard for the technologies they use.

Developers of the Cancer Bioinformatics Grid (caBIG) hope to solve this problem by creating an open-source, open-access network that enables researchers to share data and technology according to common standards and needs. The project is a collaborative effort among the National Cancer Institute, its national cancer centers, and others in the cancer research field.

“We actually have an informatics ‘Tower of Babel,’” said NCI project director Ken Buetow, Ph.D. “Each part of the cancer research community speaks its own scientific dialect. They publish in their own journals. They deposit their data in their own databases.”