Toward a Shared Vision for Cancer Genomic Data

Abstract

For the past 2 years, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the University of Chicago, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, and Leidos Biomedical Research have been developing an information system called the NCI Genomic Data Commons (GDC) (see figure ). The GDC will initially contain raw genomic data as well as diagnostic, histologic, and clinical outcome data from NCI-funded projects such as the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET) program. Unlike previous versions of these data sets, the genomic data will be “harmonized” using uniform analytic pipelines to align the raw sequencing data to the genome and identify mutations, copy-number alterations, and gene-expression changes. The research community can access the GDC through an interactive portal (https://gdc-portal.nci.nih.gov), computer systems can interact through the GDC Application Programming Interface, and developers can suggest new features based on GDC open-source code.