2026 AACR Annual Meeting NIH04 - From Data Commons to Knowledge Engine: AI Enablement Across CRDC and CCDI 

Description

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) was established to create a scalable, interoperable ecosystem for sharing and analyzing multi-modal cancer data across genomics, imaging, proteomics, clinical trials, and population-scale research. As the scale and heterogeneity of cancer data continue to expand, the primary challenge has shifted from data availability to semantic harmonization and knowledge extraction. Divergent data models, evolving standards of care, inconsistent experimental methodologies, and fragmented metadata structures limit the ability of artificial intelligence (AI) systems to generate reproducible, generalizable insights across datasets. 

To address these constraints at national scale, NCI has partnered with ARPA-H’s Biomedical Data Fabric (BDF) Toolbox program to accelerate technologies focused on ontology-driven modeling, standardized metadata frameworks, semantic crosswalks, and AI-ready infrastructure. Within the CRDC ecosystem, BDF capabilities strengthen cross-commons interoperability by aligning data elements across genomic, imaging, and clinical domains; enabling construction of longitudinal, computable patient knowledge graphs; and supporting portable feature engineering pipelines for multimodal AI workflows. This architecture transforms distributed datasets into semantically coherent, machine-readable knowledge assets capable of powering advanced analytics, predictive modeling, and hypothesis generation. 

The Childhood Cancer Data Initiative (CCDI) exemplifies the impact of CRDC and BDF technologies. By contributing harmonized pediatric oncology datasets into CRDC, CCDI leverages BDF-enabled semantic frameworks to normalize diagnoses, treatments, biospecimens, and outcomes across institutions. This integration supports cross-age comparative analyses, rare tumor subtype discovery, longitudinal outcome modeling, and AI-assisted translational research. Rather than operating as an isolated repository, CCDI benefits from CRDC’s interoperable infrastructure and BDF’s semantic layering to enhance data reusability, analytic reproducibility, and computational scalability. 

Together, CRDC and BDF represent a strategic evolution in NCI’s national data strategy—from data aggregation toward structured knowledge generation. By prioritizing semantic alignment, ontology integration, and AI enablement, this framework strengthens standards-based data sharing while accelerating insight extraction across adult and pediatric cancer research. 

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