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March 9, 2004
Abramson Cancer Center Joins National Network
to Revolutionize Cancer Research
Heralded as the new “World Wide Web
of Cancer Research”
(Philadelphia, PA) - The Abramson Cancer Center
of the University of Pennsylvania will partner
with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to create the
cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG), a network
linking individuals and institutions, both nationally
and internationally, to accelerate all aspects of cancer
research.
Clinicians and researchers at the Abramson Cancer Center
will work with 49 other NCI-designated cancer centers
to create a revolutionary information infrastructure
linking teams of cancer researchers, enabling them to
better share data and tools in an open environment with
common standards.
“The Abramson Cancer Center is the only facility
in the nation that will be a test center in all three
arms of the initiative - clinical trials management,
integrative technologies in genomics and proteomics,
and shared pathology tools and tissue banks,”
said John H. Glick, MD, the Center’s
Director. “The caBIG initiative will bring to
researchers as much data as is technologically possible,
allowing knowledge to move quickly across the country,
and, we hope, providing clinicians with the very latest
information for treating their patients.”
“We believe caBIG will become the ‘World
Wide Web’ of cancer research informatics and will
accelerate the development of exciting discoveries in
all areas of cancer research,” said NCI Director
Andrew von Eschenbach, MD. “caBIG
will be a critical asset in meeting the NCI’s
challenge goal of eliminating suffering and death due
to cancer by the year 2015.”
To date, the capacity to harvest exciting opportunities
resulting from rapid advances in cancer research - from
causes to prevention, early detection and treatment
- has been limited by the challenges that researchers
face in their ability to share critical data and tools
that support their work. This is exactly the problem
that caBIG seeks to solve. By building caBIG together,
members of the cancer research community solve a critical
problem in ways that meet their individual needs, as
well as the community’s collective needs. “caBIG
will enable diverse cancer researchers to work together
as an integrated community, where the whole becomes
truly greater than the sum of its parts,” said
von Eschenbach.
caBIG is a voluntary, open source, open access initiative
that is being designed and built in partnership with
the cancer center community. Since the caBIG pilot program
was launched in July 2003, more than 50 interested NCI-designated
cancer centers have participated in the development
of the vision, approach and structure of caBIG. Participating
cancer centers contributed project ideas to test the
feasibility of caBIG based on existing innovative tools
and available data sets.
Going forward, the National Cancer Institute’s
vision is to attract additional partners to the caBIG
network from within the National Cancer Institute and
its grantees, other NIH institutes and interested federal
health agencies, industry groups, and the broader biomedical
research community. Some of these groups have already
contributed ideas to the development of the caBIG vision.
For more information on caBIG, please go to http://caBIG.nci.nih.gov
For
a printer friendly version of this release, click
here.
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The Abramson Cancer Center
of the University of Pennsylvania was established
in 1973 as a center of excellence in cancer research,
patient care, education and outreach. Today, the Abramson
Cancer Center ranks as one of the nation’s best
in cancer care, according to US News and World Report,
and is one of the top five in National Cancer Institute
(NCI) funding. It is one of only 39 NCI-designated comprehensive
cancer centers in the United States. Home to one of
the largest clinical and research programs in the world,
the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania
has 275 active cancer researchers and 250 Penn physicians
involved in cancer prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
More information about the Abramson Cancer Center is
available at: www.pennhealth.com/cancer.
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