The Center for Technical Operations Support Group within the Bioinformatics and Computational Science Directorate developed and released the CCDI Childhood Data Catalog and the Molecular Targets Platform as part of a collaboration with the NCI to develop a Childhood Cancer Data Ecosystem. 

The National Cancer Institute Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology tasked the Frederick National Laboratory with developing the Childhood Cancer Data Ecosystem to maximize access to, use of, and interoperability of childhood cancer data.  

This ecosystem enhances the pediatric cancer community’s prevention, diagnosis, and treatment efforts for childhood cancer patients as researchers and clinicians can face challenges when attempting to access pediatric cancer data spread across multiple repositories. Since childhood cancers are rare as compared to adult cancers, the amount of data across these repositories is limited. 

The Childhood Cancer Data Ecosystem’s scope included:    

  • Essential data science infrastructure, methods, and portals  

  • Standards and tools to enable data interoperability, visualization, and analysis  

  • Services for ingesting, storing, harmonizing, and accessing data   

  • Support for data federation across multiple resources  

  • Governance to ensure the ecosystem’s long-term health and sustainability  

CCDI Childhood Cancer Data Catalog 

The Center for Technical Operations Support Group created and maintains the Childhood Cancer Data Initiative Childhood Cancer Data Catalog for referencing and reusing data, biospecimens, and tools. The initial production of this catalog was deployed in April 2022 and updated in June 2022 to include additional data and functionality improvements. It provides the research community with a searchable database of pediatric data resources, sharing clinical care and research data generated by the pediatric cancer research community.   

The group is developing natural language processing algorithms for processing data from radiation treatment summary records. The resources have been onboarded, the necessary data sharing agreements have been approved, and the team has started receiving the data.  

Childhood Cancer Clinical Data Commons (C3DC) 

The Childhood Cancer Clinical Data Commons (C3DC) will provide the research community harmonized pediatric cancer data using the Bento framework. This platform will have the ability to federate, aggregate, and integrate data from all relevant NCI-supported and community-based childhood cancer data resources.    

In collaboration with the National Cancer Institute, the Center for Technical Operations Support Group is developing and deploying a multi-tenant, enterprise-class data submission workflow process management system for submissions to the data ecosystem. The goal is to automate many of the curation activities for data submitted to NCI’s repositories and to streamline the process for data submitters.  

The team is developing a data portal to annotate and catalog CCDI data submission into a data asset inventory management system along with an overarching data federation infrastructure to support interoperability across existing data resources supported by NCI.