New cancer data commons expands available clinical and translational data

A collaboration between development teams from the National Cancer Institute and the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research has resulted in the September launch of a new data commons that houses clinical and translational cancer data. 

As the newest component of NCI’s Cancer Research Data Commons, the Clinical and Translational Data Commons (CTDC) provides researchers access to data from NCI-funded clinical trials, correlative studies, and interventional studies. Unique among the NCI’s component data commons, the CTDC includes data about participant demographics, disease stages, and targeted therapies.   

“Access to high-quality harmonized clinical and translational data is becoming more and more important for cancer researchers,” said John Otridge, Ph.D., director of the Center for Technical Operations Support within the Bioinformatics and Computational Science Directorate at the Frederick National Laboratory. 

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The new data commons launched with an inaugural dataset from the Cancer Moonshot Biobank^SM, a 5-year project to learn more about cancer with the help of participants who donate samples as they receive treatment. This biobank is part of the Cancer Moonshot, a White House initiative aiming to leverage scientific advances to benefit those dealing with cancer and by facilitating new collaborations that will drive therapeutic progress against cancer.  

Data from the Cancer Moonshot Biobank^SM include clinical data and biospecimens shared by participants throughout their treatment journey at participating U.S. medical institutions. 

Otridge's team was responsible for project management, data management, infrastructural development, and system engineering in collaboration with the NCI to create this new resource that is free to users. 

“With the release of the CTDC, researchers will now have easy access to this valuable data in the context of existing cloud-based analysis tools within the Cancer Research Data Commons,” Otridge said. “Future CTDC releases will expand access to the type of complex data researchers tell us they are looking for.”   

The data commons eliminates the need for downloading and managing large datasets. Researchers can seamlessly migrate data from the CTDC to the Seven Bridges Cancer Genomics Cloud (SB-CGC), part of NCI’s secure cloud environment, which offers a comprehensive suite of computational tools for analyzing large-scale data. 

The CTDC continues to expand, with additional data sets to be released as they become available.