CRDC Insights

The CRDC team, whether engaged in activities specific to the CRDC Data Commons, NCI Cloud Resource, or CRDC’s Core Services, remains focused on advancing its mission of making data and resources securely accessible to the cancer research community. The team has provided updates. 

In March 2026, the Genomic Data Commons (GDC) reached a major milestone: 233,000 unique visitors in a single month. Launched in 2016, the GDC was established to harmonize genomic data from several NCI-funded projects, including The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), one of the largest collaborations of its time. Today, researchers worldwide rely on the GDC for access to more than 10 petabytes of data across 91 project datasets.  

  The NIH Data Management and Sharing (DMS) Policy sets clear expectations for NIH-funded research: scientific data should be made publicly accessible in a timely and responsible manner. The Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) Submission Portal makes data sharing easier by providing cancer researchers with a single, unified entry point for submitting data across multiple CRDC Data Commons. Over the past two years, teams across the cancer research community have used the CRDC Submission Portal and are now sharing their experiences.      

The NCI/NIH-sponsored session at the AACR 2026 Annual Meeting, "From Data Commons to Knowledge Engine: AI Enablement Across CRDC and CCDI," drew a strong audience. The session included updates spanning the CRDC ecosystem, the Childhood Cancer Data Initiative (CCDI), and the ARPA-H Biomedical Data Fabric (BDF) Toolbox program.