Celebrating the 10th Anniversary
A decade of discoveries in Cancer Discovery. For the community. By the Community.
Research
An Essential Tool for the Cancer Research Community
At the beginning of the last decade, the field of cancer genomics blossomed as the cost of next-generation sequencing rapidly declined and large national and international consortia sequenced an increasing number of tumors, but data generated through these efforts was not easily or directly available to cancer researchers for their own analyses. In 2012, Cerami, et al., introduced the cBioPortal for Cancer Genomics, a resource for integration and visualization of multidimensional cancer genomic datasets, including mutational data, copy number alternations, mRNA expression, DNA methylation, and protein and phosphoprotein levels. Researchers can use cBioPortal to visualize their own data, and they can download genomic datasets for their own use. Initially containing 5 published data sets and 15 provisional TCGA datasets, the cBioPortal now contains data on over 100,000 tumor samples from nearly 300 studies across dozens of cancer types and is an open-source resource maintained by a multi-institutional team. The initial report on cBioPortal has been cited almost 6,000 times since its publication, pointing to cBioPortal’s broad utility and continued value to the cancer research community.
