Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid

The caBIG logo

The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG®) is an open source, open access information network enabling secure data exchange throughout the cancer community. The initiative was developed by the National Cancer Institute (part of the National Institutes of Health) and is maintained by the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT).

History

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) launched the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG®) initiative in 2004 to connect all components of the biomedical research enterprise, thereby enabling access to a plurality of data types regardless of physical location. The program, spearheaded by the Center for Bioinformatics and Information Technology (CBIIT), began with a 3-year pilot phase to test the feasibility of the initiative. The pilot phase concluded in March 2007, and today full-scale deployment of caBIG® technology is underway at 56 NCI-designated cancer centers. To date, more than 2,000 participants representing 700 organizations are “getting connected” with caBIG®. In addition to caGrid, the underlying infrastructure that enables data to be shared among organizations, caBIG® has developed numerous software tools, data sharing policies, and common standards and vocabularies to facilitate data sharing. Current capabilities include:

• Collection, analysis, and management of basic research data
• Clinical trials management, from patient enrollment to adverse event reporting and analysis
• Collection, annotation, sharing, and storage of medical imaging data
• Biospecimen management

Impact on Biomedical Research and Personalized Medicine

caBIG® provides foundational technology that enables a new approach to biomedicine called a “learning healthcare system.” This model of research and care delivery relies on the rapid exchange of information between all sectors of research and care, so that researchers and clinicians are able to collaboratively review and accurately incorporate the latest findings into their work. The ultimate goal is to speed the biomedical research process, leading to improved patient outcomes and more efficient healthcare delivery. This new approach is often called Personalized Medicine where the right patient is given the right drug, at the right time. caBIG® technology is powering novel adaptive clinical trialssuch as the I-SPY2 TRIAL (Investigation of Serial studies to Predict Your Therapeutic Response with Imaging and molecular AnaLysis 2), which are designed to use biomarkers to determine the appropriate therapy for women with advanced breast cancer. By collecting and analyzing clinical data in (nearly) real-time, patients' responses to therapy can be rapidly assessed to measure the effectiveness of a particular treatment, and clinical decisions may be refined to achieve optimal outcomes.

Connections to Health Information Technology

Health Information Technology (HIT) enables comprehensive management and secure exchange of medical information between researchers, health care providers, and consumers. When properly applied, HIT can improve the quality of health care; help prevent medical errors; and reduce redundancy, paperwork and administrative inefficiencies, ultimately leading to improved patient outcomes. caBIG® supports national HIT initiatives including:

• Electronic Health Records – NCI and the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) have initiated a collaboration to create an oncology-specific EHR that utilizes caBIG® standards for interoperability and that will enable oncologists to manage patient information in an electronic format that accurately captures the specific interventional issues unique to oncology.
• Family Health History Tool – CBIIT hosts the Family Health History Tool, a web-based application developed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to allow users to easily track and share family health information with healthcare providers so that it may be used to inform decisions about prevention, diagnosis and treatment to improve individual patient outcomes.
• Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) – An initiative to share patient clinical data across geographically disparate sources and create electronically-linked national health information exchange (HIE).

Types of Technologies

• Software Tools − caBIG® offers a number of software tools to support basic and clinical research including:
  • caArray − managing microarray data
  • Cancer Adverse Event Reporting System (caAERS) − logging and reporting participant adverse events
  • Cancer Central Clinical Participant Registry (C3PR) − managing clinical trial participant registration
  • Cancer Genome − Wide Association Studies (caGWAS) − analyzing GWAS data sets
  • caTissue Suite − Biobanking Management System − acquiring, annotating, storing and tracking biospecimens
  • caBIG Integration Hub(formerly caXchange) Clinical Data Exchange System − integrating data across multiple clinical applications
  • GenePattern − analyzing microarray and SNP data
  • geWorkbench − managing microarray gene expression and sequence data management
  • Lab Viewer − viewing clinical laboratory results
  • National Biomedical Imaging Archive (NBIA) − managing DICOM-compliant medial image data
  • Patient Study Calendar (PSC) − tracking clinical trial participant activities
  • caIntegrator2 − integrating and aggregating biomedical research data
• Grid Computing − caBIG® uses a grid computing system, caGrid, as its fundamental technology. Based on the open-source Globus grid technology, and currently in its sixth major release, caGrid v1.3 is the open-source platform which facilitates data sharing between caBIG®-compatible applications.
• Cloud Computing − caBIG® technology supports cloud computing and caBIG® tools were designed for interoperability to run on both Windows and Linux platforms. caBIG® tools are currently being hosted in cloud computing environments.

Collaborations and Key Partners

• BIG Health Consortium™ (BIG Health) – BIG Health was launched as a partnership of previously un-linked healthcare stakeholders who are now connected via caBIG®. The Consortium supports personalized medicine by encouraging a collaborative approach to biomedical research and healthcare delivery.
• Health of Women Study – In July 2009, caBIG® entered into a research collaboration with the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation to build the first ever online cohort of one million women to investigate the causes and prevention of breast cancer. The study will leverage caBIG® technology to store the abundance of data. Potential participants sign up for this research study through the Love/Avon Army of Women.
• The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) – caBIG® forms the information infrastructure of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), an integrated database of molecular and clinical data. TCGA is a large-scale collaborative effort supported by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) to accelerate our understanding of the genetics of cancer using innovative genome analysis technologies. TCGA aims to characterize more than 10,000 tumors across at least 20 cancers by 2015. caBIG® provides connectivity, data standards, and tools to collect, organize, share, and analyze the diverse research data from multiple laboratories and among different institutions that populate this database. Through the TCGA Data Portal, researchers and clinicians can easily perform complex queries, allowing unprecedented opportunities to discover and develop a new generation of targeted diagnostics, therapies, and preventive interventions for cancer.
• National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) – Since 2007, NCI has been working with UK cancer research association, NCRI, to foster a partnership that will benefit global cancer research. The two organizations share a variety of technologies developed to enable collaborative research and the secure exchange of research data using caGrid and the NCRI Oncology Information Exchange (ONIX) portal.
• Duke University- Duke is leveraging several caBIG® clinical trials tools in their collaboration with the Beijing Cancer Hospital of Peking University.
• Latin American Breast Cancer Study – The countries that make up the United States-Latin America Cancer Research Network (US-LA CRN) will link their research efforts through caBIG®, to allow data- and knowledge-sharing in a recently launched a breast cancer study.

Implementation

Adopt vs. Adapt

Participating institutions may either “adopt” pre-existing caBIG® tools to share data directly through caGrid, or “adapt” commercial or in-house developed software to be caBIG®-compatible. The caBIG® program has developed Software Development Kits (SDKs) that support the creation of interoperable software tools and detailed instructions on the process of adapting existing tools or developing new applications to be caBIG®-compatible.

Programs

• Cancer Centers Program – Most of the 65 NCI-designated cancer centers use caBIG® technology to report and retrieve data. caBIG® was originally developed specifically to connect these centers as a way to enable collaborative research and eliminate data disconnects that slow down the development of personalized medicine.
• NCI Community Cancer Centers Program – The NCCCP is a program to test the concept of a national network of community-based cancer centers. Many of the 16 centers in the program are implementing caBIG® tools in support of their research and care programs.
• Enterprise Support Network (ESN) – The ESN is a diverse collection of organizations that support the caBIG® community by providing services, mentoring and expertise. The ESN program includes Knowledge Centers that provide domain-specific expertise to assist users about caBIG® tools and their applications, and Support Service Providers, which are third party organizations that provide assistance to end-users and organizations adopting caBIG® technology on a contract-for-services basis.

Further Reading

• Abernethy AP, Coeytauz R, Rowe K, Wheeler JL, Lyerly HK. Electronic patient-reported data capture as the foundation of a learning health care system. JCO. 2009;27:6522.
• Buetow KH. caBIG: proof of concept for personalized cancer care. JCO. 2009:27 Suppl 15S:e20712.
• Holford ME, Rajeevan H, Zhao H, Kidd KK, Cheung KH: Semantic web-based integration of cancer pathways and allele frequency data. In: Cancer Informatics. 8. Jahrgang, 2009, S. 19–30, PMID 19458791, PMC 2664696 (freier Volltext). 
• Huang T, Shenoy PJ, Sinha R, Graiser M, Bumpers KW, Flowers CR: Development of the Lymphoma Enterprise Architecture Database: A caBIG(tm) Silver level compliant System. In: Cancer Informatics. 8. Jahrgang, 2009, S. 45–64, PMID 19492074, PMC 2675136 (freier Volltext). 
• Kunz I, Lin MC, Frey L: Metadata mapping and reuse in caBIG. In: BMC Bioinformatics. 10 Suppl 2. Jahrgang, 2009, S. S4, doi:10.1186/1471-2105-10-S2-S4, PMID 19208192, PMC 2646244 (freier Volltext). 
• Novik Y, Escalon L, Rolnitzky L. Academic cancer researchers' perspective on a federally mandated centralized comprehensive database of all cancer clinical trial results. JCO. 2009;27:e17576.
• Ohmann C, Kuchinke W: Future developments of medical informatics from the viewpoint of networked clinical research. Interoperability and integration. In: Methods of Information in Medicine. 48. Jahrgang, Nr. 1, 2009, S. 45–54, PMID 19151883 (schattauer.de). 
• Phan JH, Moffitt RA, Stokes TH, et al.: Convergence of biomarkers, bioinformatics and nanotechnology for individualized cancer treatment. In: Trends in Biotechnology. 27. Jahrgang, Nr. 6, Juni 2009, S. 350–8, doi:10.1016/j.tibtech.2009.02.010, PMID 19409634. 
• Staes CJ, Xu W, LeFevre SD, et al.: A case for using grid architecture for state public health informatics: the Utah perspective. In: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making. 9. Jahrgang, 2009, S. 32, doi:10.1186/1472-6947-9-32, PMID 19545428, PMC 2707374 (freier Volltext). 
• ? doi:10.1007/978-3-642-01247-1_11. 
• “Health IT gets personal,” InformationWeek (11/13/09)
• “Health data in the raw,” Government Health IT (11/6/09)
• “NCI to open research grid to cancer patient 'army',” Government Health IT (10/9/09)
• “GridBriefing: The future of Healthcare - eHealth and Grid Computing,” GridTalk (9/09)
• “Collaboration and Sustainability are Front and Center as caBIG® Celebrates Fifth Anniversary,” GenomeWeb/BioInform (7/09)
• “Love/Avon Army of Women to Use NCI's caBIG® Computational Platform for Breast Cancer Research,” The Scientist (7/09)
• “Sharing the Wealth of Data,” Scientific American (5/09)
• “Translational Research Drives Demand for 'Virtual' Biobanks Built on caBIG Tools,” GenomeWeb/BioInfom (4/3/09)
• “Connecting the Cancer Community caBIG® Time,” Bio-IT World (7/14/08)
• “Heading for the BIG Time,” The Scientist (4/08)

External Links

• caBIG® Consumer/User Website (non-technical)
• caBIG® Community Website (technical)
• NCI Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT)
• BIG Health Consortium™
• National Cancer Institute
• National Institutes of Health