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), ...