The NCI Office of Data Sharing (ODS) hosted its inaugural data jamboree on September 29 – 30, 2025, in conjunction with its 3^rd Annual Symposium. Designed to promote data use and reuse, the event also fostered interdisciplinary collaboration to gain real-time feedback and suggestions on areas for improvement. The focus this year was on pediatric, adolescent, and young adult (AYA) cancers, rare diseases that still face tremendous challenges to improve diagnosis and therapeutic options despite the development and sharing of large-scale research datasets.   

Several participating teams leveraged CRDC-housed data and resources, as well as the Childhood Cancer Data Initiative (CCDI) Hub, to address identified challenges. For example, some teams used genomic data housed in the CRDC’s General Commons and datasets from CRDC’s Imaging Data Commons (IDC). During the jamboree, participants were offered access to the Seven Bridges Cancer Genome Cloud (SB-CGC) compute environment with complementary cloud credits typically available to new SB-CGC users. SB-CGC is part of the CRDC, providing analytical resources and secure workspaces for cancer research.

The jamboree attracted over 120 participants from academia, industry, government, and non-profit organizations. Twenty-three interdisciplinary teams formed to tackle specific challenges across six broad project categories:

• Enhancing data interoperability
• Building study cohorts
• Developing, refining or validating informatics tools and pipelines
• Evaluating data quality and AI-readiness
• Integrating and analyzing multi-omic and multi-modal data
• Developing tutorials, tools, and educational materials

Among the project teams that leveraged data in the CRDC were: 

• Nationwide Children's Hospital: Used images from the Imaging Data Commons (IDC) and metadata from the NCI Childhood Cancer Data Initiative (CCDI), housed in the CRDC General Commons, to test a proof-of-concept approach for molecular tumor subtyping without sequencing.
• St. Jude Children's Research Hospital: Analyzed Molecular Characterization Initiative (MCI) variant call files, accessible via the CCDI Hub Explore Dashboard, and integrated tumor mutation data with IDC imaging to investigate potential misdiagnoses in MCI cases.

Beginning in January 2026, ODS will kick off a series of public webinars for Data Jamboree teams to share their findings, lessons learned, and future directions.

Upcoming Webinar: January 13, 2026 — 11:00 am to 1:00 pm ET | Register

Speakers:

• Emily Boja, NCI ODS — Jamboree Overview
• Michael Sierk, NCI Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology — VCF Table Viewer: Interactive Visualization of VCF Files from Childhood Cancer Data Initiative (CCDI)
• James Galbraith and Lucy Han, Booz Allen Hamilton — Practical Quality Assessment & Enrichment of Childhood/AYA Cancer Datasets
• David Higgins, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia — Tutorial and Example Notebooks for the Kids First Variant Workbench
• Gavriel Matt, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital — Identifying and Annotating Variants Associated with Headaches in Childhood Cancer Survivors

Save the Date: February 24, 2026 — 11:00 am to 1:00 pm ET | Hold the date and register