The CRDC team presented at the 2024 AACR Annual Meeting in an NCI-Sponsored Session highlighting the impact of the CRDC on the broad cancer research community. The presentations from the CBIIT Director and members of the Informatics and Data Science Program provided insightful overviews, inspiring success stories, valuable lessons learned, and future plans for the CRDC. Erika Kim, PhD, served as moderator, and dynamic discussions with attendees followed the presentations.

Ina Felau, MS, started the session with an overview of the CRDC’s evolving structure and the various ways that researchers can access data through its Data Commons and Cloud Resources, depending on their research interests. The community was encouraged to explore the range of support resources that are available for those interested in learning how to work within the CRDC. Felau also noted that the CRDC is addressing interoperability challenges through its own interoperability initiatives, and by participating in a wider NIH initiative to ensure that NIH-funded research data adhere to NIH’s FAIR data principles.

Scientific and technical CRDC success stories were presented by Esmeralda (Emi) Casas-Silva, PhD. The first case summarized recent research uncovering potential improvements for risk stratification strategies of patients with Papillary Thyroid Cancer. The research leveraged data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) data and machine learning tools to uncover epigenetic differences between cancer subtypes. Another success story focused on a pan-cancer immune landscape study recently published in Cell, based on NCI’s Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) data, accessible through the CRDC. Through analysis of genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic data, this work identified seven distinct immune subtypes across ten types of cancer that may help inform patient stratification and new therapeutic target research. A third story focused on the development of the Childhood Cancer Data Initiative (CCDI), a federated pediatric cancer data ecosystem. The CCDI’s data infrastructure was built using a framework developed by the CRDC team. Its data are housed in the CRDC’s Cancer Data Service, which easily integrates with the Seven Bridges Cancer Genomics Cloud, one of three cloud resources included in the CRDC.

Anthony (Tony) Kerlavage, PhD, offered his reflections based on his involvement with the CRDC over the past ten years. He recently announced his retirement, after serving as Director of the Center for Biomedical & Information Technology (CBIIT) for five years, following two years as the acting CBIIT Director and five years as CBIIT Data Ecosystem Branch Chief.

Kerlavage provided an overview of the impact CRDC has had on cancer research over the last ten years, and pointed to new developments, notably a CRDC collaboration with the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) that will further streamline data collection from current and new sources and improve usability across disciplines. Finally, he noted longer term goals of integrating molecular and clinical data into the CRDC and developing ways to support federated research of interest to the clinical research community.

Find a PPT of the presentation here.

The session concluded with thoughtful dialog between the CRDC team and attendees about upcoming CRDC initiatives.

In addition to this NCI-Sponsored session, several members of the CRDC team presented posters on specific projects.