Biden Launches Genomic Data Commons to Aid Sharing in Oncology

By Lori Solomon, Editor, Diagnostic Testing & Emerging Technologies

Genomic Data Commons (GDC) launched this week as a core component of the National Cancer Moonshot and the President’s Precision Medicine Initiative to promote data sharing between cancer researchers and accelerate the pace of discovery in personalized oncology care. The data platform’s initial release included genetic and clinical information from more than 14,000 cancer patients and tumors. The hope is that the GDC will form the basis of a “comprehensive knowledge system for cancer” to elucidate insights into cancer biology and effective therapy.

“With the GDC, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has made a major commitment to maintaining long-term storage of cancer genomic data and providing researchers with free access to these data,” said NCI acting director Douglas Lowy, M.D., in a statement. “Importantly, the explanatory power of data in the GDC will grow over time as data from more patients are included, and ultimately the GDC will accelerate our efforts in precision medicine.”

GDC centralizes, standardizes, and harmonizes genomic and clinical data on a unified and interoperable platform. Data from large-scale NCI programs such as The Cancer Genome Atlas and the pediatric study, Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments—some of the largest cancer genomics datasets in the world—will be publicly available to researchers as a result of this effort. GDC launched with 4.1 petabytes of data from NCI-supported research programs. (One petabyte is equivalent to 223,000 DVDs completely filled with data). GDC will also accept cancer-related genomic and clinical data submissions (including imaging and histological data, as well as treatment response information) from researchers internationally.

By sharing, researchers will be able to use the “state-of-the-art” analytic methods housed in GDC, hopefully making GDC an important resource for generating potentially actionable information. All data will be harmonized using standardized software algorithms and the raw, stored genomic data will be reanalyzed as computational methods and genome annotations improve.

“Today, making discoveries from cancer genomic data is challenging because diverse research groups analyze different cancer datasets using various methods that are not easily comparable,” said GDC principal investigator Robert Grossman, Ph.D., from the University of Chicago, in a statement. “GDC brings together genomic datasets and analyzes the data using a common set of methods so that researchers may more easily make discoveries, and, in this sense, democratizes the analysis of large cancer genomic datasets.”

GDC is being built and managed by the University of Chicago Center for Data Intensive Science in collaboration with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, as part of a subcontract with NCI-funded Leidos Biomedical Research (Frederick, Md.).