If cancer research is tough to begin with, coordinating it among dozens of major institutions might sound like a thankless job. Engineer Jack London participates in such an effort. His thanks, he says, will be the satisfaction of helping the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) set up a computer network linking all its designated cancer centers.
London, director of the Informatics Core at Thomas Jefferson University's Kimmel Cancer Center in Philadelphia, says the city will be a key node on this grid, thanks to its sheer number of designated cancer centers. Second only to New York, Philadelphia has four: Kimmel, the Wistar Institute, the Fox Chase Cancer Center, and the University of Pennsylvania's Abramson Cancer Center.
"Not many people know" about the network, called the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG), says London, "but it's been a major initiative. It'll definitely change cancer research." The $20 million-per-year project, now in its fourth year, is sometimes called the "World Wide Web of cancer research," and is designed to let investigators readily share information from the most preliminary findings through the clinical trials process. The grid has parts already in use and others still under development, and it is billed as a starting point for similar efforts that would cover other diseases.
More than 50 NCI-designated cancer centers and about 140 other organizations, some of them abroad, are involved, including the United Kingdom's National Cancer Research Institute and multinational corporations such as Munich, Germany-based Siemens. Various institutions are creating different parts of the grid through contract with the NCI, or on a volunteer basis. Small groups of them focus on developing specific computer programs that form parts of the project.
The Kimmel Center is working on software that would allow users to find other investigators nationwide who have collections of specific types of cancer tissue. At Jefferson one researcher has "been amassing colorectal tissue; somebody else, breast tissue," London says, but a scientist across the country has no simple way to learn of these resources. Jefferson is developing the program along with the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. The target date for the software's release is March 2008, but June is more realistic, says London. The lead developer of that program is Washington University in St. Louis, Mo.
CaBIG consists of a loose collection of programs, freely available on the Web, and databases shareable through those programs. Some of the databases are available on the Web; others, out of security concerns, through a closed computer network that links participating institutions by means of special software.
Wistar has participated in developing several programs for caBIG, says Louise Showe, a professor in Wistar's molecular and oncogenesis program. One of these, already completed, is called Distance Weighted Discrimination. It performs statistical corrections designed to minimize systematic discrepancies among data sets originating from different time periods or laboratories. That "allows you to put the data together and analyze it," Showe says, adding that she has published research using the program. She's also participating in developing a program enabling the sharing of microarray information.
CaBIG is a massive undertaking, "like a second job, and ... becoming more like a first job," London says, with CaBIG-related conferences and travel a routine part of the work.