caBIG®: The Next Big Thing
Think of it as a next generation World Wide Web for the medical community — a virtual network of interconnected data, individuals and organizations that has the capacity to redefine how research is conducted, how care is provided, and how patients and participants interact with the biomedical research enterprise.
caBIG®, the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, is a biomedical network with the power to capture and analyze huge amounts of biological and clinical data. With the ability to widely disseminate information, caBIG® is a powerful new tool that can bring together medical communities and accelerate research discoveries that are informed by scientists around the world.
The new information technology was first developed at the National Cancer Institute under the leadership of Dr. Kenneth Buetow, whose scientific career has focused for more than 20 years on understanding the role of genetics in complex human diseases such as cancer, and on applying sophisticated informatics technologies to solve major biomedical challenges. At NCI, Dr. Buetow is Chief of the Laboratory of Population Genetics and Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Information Technology.
"caBIG® resembles the worldwide web in that it is immediate, accessible and highly dynamic,” notes Dr. Buetow. “But caBIG® does something beyond those attributes. Because we have ‘data about data,’ users get the data they want and we can write "smart tools" that can find and use data without human intervention and thereby solve 21st century problems.”
Dr. Buetow holds a Ph.D. in human genetics from the University of Pittsburgh. His own research at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia sparked the idea for caBIG®. At Fox Chase from 1986 to 1998, Dr. Buetow’s group generated and electronically distributed the human genetic map.
“It became clear to me that we would exceed the capacity of our current technology, limiting what we could do. It was clear that even large-scale institutions like Fox Chase would struggle with an overload of data being generated, thanks to the vast amount of genomic information becoming available. Part of the reason for my enthusiasm is that I’m not just an IT developer, I’m also a ‘customer’.”
At NCI, Dr. Buetow has spearheaded efforts of the Genetic Annotation Initiative, an attempt to identify variant forms of the cancer genes identified through the NCI Cancer Genome Anatomy Project. He is particularly interested in genetic variations that make individuals more susceptible to liver, lung, prostate, breast and ovarian cancer. His group combines computational tools with bench-top laboratory findings to understand how genes and environment interact to increase cancer risk.
Launched six years ago, caBIG® has been gaining traction. caBIG® is already deployed in more than 56 NCI-designated cancer centers and 16 community cancer centers in the United States. More than 2,000 individuals from 700 institutions have gotten involved. And it’s going global. In addition to a longstanding partnership in the United Kingdom, the caBIG® community is collaborating with 16 international groups around the world.
- Dr. Kenneth Buetow.
The NCI and the UK National Cancer Research Initiative (NCRI) continue to build on a longstanding cooperative effort to support data interoperability. Among these efforts is the connection of the NCRI’s ONcology Information eXchange (ONIX) portal to caGrid, enabling cancer researchers around the world to access a large number of research databases maintained in the US and the UK. The two are also exploring ways to speed scientific discovery by leveraging the best applications and technologies developed by each organization.
In Latin America, a pilot program is supporting two clinical trials conducted on molecularly characterized stage II and stage III breast cancer patients in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay. Using caBIG® software tools such as caTissue, caArray, and the caBIG® Clinical Trials Management Suite (CTMS), researchers can compare data collected at all sites in the study.
In China, Duke University has launched a pilot collaboration with Beijing University Cancer Hospital using caBIG® tools and technology to conduct a Phase II clinical trial for breast cancer. This collaboration marks the first clinical trial in China to conduct all patient registrations electronically. caBIG® is also working with the Shanghai Center for Bioinformatics Technology to develop mutually beneficial exchanges of knowledge and technology.
In Jordan, the NCI is also supporting the development of the new King Hussein Institute for Biotechnology and Cancer near Amman. This center will support basic and translational research while providing state-of-the-art medical care for cancer patients. The collaboration is focused on the adoption of caBIG® tools to provide the standards that will enable data interoperability and the widespread adoption of electronic health records.
Institutions in Australia, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Pakistan are also connected. As more organizations connect to caGrid, notes Dr. Buetow, the value of the data on the network increases.
“The human capital resources in the developing world are truly an untapped resource for solving the world’s problems,” says Dr. Buetow. “Adoption of caBIG® tools and technology allows investigators, the bright minds of the biomedical community, to suddenly have access to state-of-the-art information. Basically, through caBIG® infrastructure, someone anywhere in the world can do the same genomic analysis, can use the same tools, and can bring equally important insights as anyone working at Broad Institute [the genomic medicine research center affiliated with MIT and Harvard].”
All it takes to delve into a rich and diverse collection of data is access to a computer, an Internet connection and a Web browser.
“There’s a misperception that you need to establish an elaborate infrastructure to benefit from caBIG® technology,” says Dr. Buetow. “With just a user name and password, more than 1,000 investigators worldwide are doing analysis on brain cancer data collected in something we call REMBRANDT [the Repository of Molecular Brain Neoplasia Data]. The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the Cancer Molecular Analysis portals give users access to data generated from collaborative studies endeavoring to better understand the underlying causes of cancer.”
caBIG® also offers a collection of open source software and infrastructure to enhance the capacity of institutions to manage clinical trials locally. In Pakistan, for instance, one doctor downloaded and installed the software that now supports clinical trials at her hospital.
Researchers are already doing amazing things with caBIG®—retrieving medical images through the National Biomedical Imaging Archive (NBIA) repository, accessing high-quality biospecimens, and combining proteomics, gene expression and other basic research data in a single data management system—but Dr. Buetow is most excited by what the future holds.
“caBIG® is a community-directed activity,” he says. “With open components and open work spaces, anyone can join in and determine what direction caBIG® should take. Part of our direction comes from the community itself, people considering how to make the explosion of genomic information useful. Other directions are determined in part by following trends worldwide. For the past year, for instance, we’ve been making sure we can leverage the international investment in health information technology so we can connect research enterprises to delivery centers.”
The caBIG® Annual Meeting in September 2010 drew more than 1,000 individuals—representing 17 countries—to Washington, DC, to consider how the new technology is powering innovative translational research and clinical trials. In its current state, Dr. Buetow noted, the biomedical community is largely a collection of highly fragmented, disconnected silos. IT systems lack the capacity to interoperate. Disparate terms complicate information exchanges between one institution and another. Scientists have to manage “a tsunami” of molecular and clinical data, and islands of information are floating out there, with no standard methodology in place to capture and use that information in scientific studies. caBIG® technology seeks to address each of those challenges.
“caBIG® is about community, connectivity and content,” he remarked during the meeting. “It’s a way of using information technology to bring together disparate and, at times, desperate parts of the biomedical community in general, and the cancer community specifically. Our idea is that by creating this community, connecting them using information technology, and providing them with rich content, we can transform the face of cancer medicine, and ultimately all of biomedicine.”
It is a breathtaking proposition, but not so far-fetched given the speed of recent technological advances. Dr. Buetow was a graduate student when his lab purchased its first computer. He remembers when the World Wide Web came online. His lab was among the first groups in biomedicine to create a Web site to collect and distribute information.
Within the past ten years, he says, we have experienced a confluence of events that led to the development of caBIG®. High-performance computing, with its large-scale capacity to hold, manage and process data, is now readily available. Internet technology has exploded. And with advances in genome sequencing, a wealth of scientific knowledge at the biological and molecular levels is emerging.
“There’s a critical need for us to take action,” Buetow said at the annual caBIG® meeting. “We need to take advantage of this moment to transform the biomedical system as it stands today. We need to empower this collection of innovators who will take the tsunami of data that is part of the biomedical enterprise and figure out how to convert it from data, to information, to knowledge, and ultimately, to wisdom. We need to figure out how to put this powerful information in the hands of the individuals who can do powerful things with it.”
