Using biomedical informatics to see the forest AND the trees for molecular diagnostics in cancer therapeutic development

Cancer research in general—and molecular diagnostic development in particular—are leveraging the diverse collection of publicly-accessible molecular information that underpins disease. The ability to access and integrate this information will be crucial to the development of molecular diagnostics. Use of this data requires overcoming the silos and data disconnects common throughout biomedicine and new models for interpreting this massive amount of information. The National Cancer Institute has developed the caBIG® initiative (Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid) to integrate the diverse multidimensional data. An active area of research is developing biologic process models for integrating and interpreting this massive volume of data.

The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) is an example of the challenges faced in transforming data to information. Large volumes of diverse, multidimensional data including various genomic characterizations and clinical information must be synthesized. Through the caBIG® generated Cancer Molecular Analysis portal (http://cma.nci.nih.gov), it is possible to see integrated views of the TCGA data from different research perspectives including genomic and clinical views. Tools leveraging this data can be used to display and analyze the data in biologic networks. As more TCGA data and additional molecular data are shared through the portal it will become increasingly possible to obtain a comprehensive view of the molecular basis of cancer and drive development of molecular diagnostics.