Celebrating the 10th Anniversary
A decade of discoveries in Cancer Discovery. For the community. By the Community.
Authors
Their impactful studies. In their words.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Our Cancer Discovery paper literally put cBioPortal on the map. It's been an amazing ride, and we are so grateful to Cancer Discovery and everyone else who has supported the platform over the past ten years.
Q: What was the origin of the cBioPortal?
A: The cBioPortal was originally developed at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) to help analyze genomic data generated by The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project. We first developed cBioPortal as an exploratory data analysis (EDA) platform to help us do our own research, but once we started to show it to others within TCGA and MSKCC, we realized that others found it quite useful too, and we received a flood of feature requests. We also realized that cBioPortal filled a unique niche—enabling translational researchers and clinicians to more easily explore very large genomic data sets without requiring any bioinformatics expertise. cBioPortal continues to fill this niche, and we have thousands of dedicated users all over the world now!
Q: What were some of the unexpected challenges or successes in developing this resource?
A: When we first started cBioPortal, we really had no idea that it would become so widely used. With success came significant challenges, including how to scale the system, how to prioritize user requests, how to provide user training and education, how to collaborate across multiple cancer centers, and how to secure long-term funding. To meet these challenges, we are very fortunate to have such a dedicated user base, and steady funding from the NCI Informatics Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR) program, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The platform has also morphed into a true open source platform, and we now integrate contributions from developers across the globe. An ongoing challenge is the curation of publicly available genomic data sets to make them available in cBioPortal. We need to make it easier for users to contribute data sets directly, and we could work with journals to ensure that genomic data sets and accompanying clinical data are made available and accessible with publication.
Q: What has been the paper’s greatest impact in the years to follow?
A: Our Cancer Discovery paper literally put cBioPortal on the map…every hour of every day, someone is on cBioPortal, and we now get emails from all over the world. In fact, over 300K unique users access cBioPortal each year, and we have continued to see study growth across the globe. In addition, countless private instances of cBioPortal exist around the world at research institutions, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies. It's been an amazing ride, and we are so grateful to Cancer Discovery and everyone else who has supported the platform over the past ten years. We also remain excited about the future of cBioPortal, and we now have a dedicated team across multiple cancer centers that works nonstop adding new features, responding to user queries, doing live webinars, and dreaming about the future of the platform.
