Details of the project, known as Genomic Data Commons (GDC), were set to be announced by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago.
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Vice President Joe Biden spoke in front of one of the largest gatherings of cancer doctors and healthcare executives in the world and asked for their help on Monday.
Testbed for new approaches: The NCI GDC is unique in that it provides raw, unprocessed genomic data, allowing researchers to reanalyze the information as new computational tools and analytical methods are developed.
“With the GDC, NCI has made a major commitment to maintaining long-term storage of cancer genomic data and providing researchers with free access to these data”, said Dr. Douglas Lowy, acting director of the NCI. The GDC is a critical step in crowdsourcing rich data to researchers from across the community.
Biden pitched the idea of a cancer moonshot past year when he said he would not seek the Democratic presidential nomination after the death of his son, Beau, last summer. GDC will bolster the administration and Department of Health and Human Services’ efforts around the Precision Medicine Initiative, which aims to gather data on patients’ genes, environment and lifestyle to help researchers find better treatments for diseases like cancer. With new combinations of medicine and more precise medicines popping up for cancer treatment, huge amounts of data are necessary to figure out what works for who and what doesn’t. He has warned that research “silos” will only slow progress. Scientists will be able to re-analyze the raw data according to their interests.
Biden said he hoped efforts like the “moonshot” and GDC will help researchers spend more productive time in the lab and less writing grant proposals.
The GDC will support several genome-related projects within the NCI, including the Center for Cancer Genomics, Cancer Genome Atlas, Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments, and the Cancer Genome Characterization Initiative.
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“An worldwide response to cancer should reflect the same urgency we bring to infectious disease threats, with the associated resources and global cooperation”, Biden said. The White House says it’s easily searchable and includes protections for privacy and security. “You think I’m kidding”, Biden said. “These datasets will lead to a much deeper understanding of which therapies are most effective for individual cancer patients”.
