Cancer projects today are large in scale and create large amounts of data. These big data projects take a lot of work to run and to track all the data they produce. The Genome Informatics (GI) Program builds websites and software tools that allow researchers and the public to access, manage and study large amounts of cancer data.
Almost all human diseases, like cancer, have some basis in our genes. With advances in research tools, researchers can find changes in our genes to learn what causes cancer and how to treat it more effectively. Around the world, cancer researchers collect large amounts of data about our genes. This data can be used to answer problems in cancer research. But these researchers need help to manage, sort and access this data. So they need websites and software tools for sharing data across the cancer research community safely and securely, and always with patient consent. Researchers can then use this data to make new discoveries faster and treat cancer better, leading to improved patient outcomes.
GI is made up of two teams. The Software Engineering team builds websites and software tools for big data projects around the world. These projects include the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and the Cancer Genome Collaboratory. The Research IT team provides safe and secure big data storage and advanced computing power. These resources allow cancer researchers to work with and share data from their work. The GI teams also help the Adaptive Oncology (AO) Program and OICR achieve their cancer research goals.
Our program’s resources and skills are shared with Ontario and the global research community. We also connect people to the data to advance research about cancer and other diseases.
The Genome Informatics Program develops new software, databases and other necessary components to store, organize and compute over the large and complex datasets being generated by OICR’s cancer research programs. Our resources and expertise are shared with the Ontario cancer research community, with the goal of accelerating cancer research and bringing treatments to the clinic faster.
Our mission is to advance the knowledge and treatment of cancer by facilitating computation on big cancer datasets.
Our research objectives are to:
- Develop information systems that inform and apply our understanding of cancer biology to cancer clinical care
- Harmonize and disseminate large cancer-related data sets
- Train the next generation of software engineers to work on cancer-related big data problems
- Through technology, foster efficiency, communication and collaboration within and among Genome Informatics and Computational Biology, OICR and the wider community
- Articulate and translate Genome Informatics’ achievements and impacts
Further opportunities to collaborate
OICR is committed to strengthening cancer research in Ontario through collaboration and broadening access to our technology infrastructure, expertise and resources. Please visit OICR’s Collaborative Research Resources directory for more opportunities to collaborate.
Principal investigators and directors in the Genome Informatics Program have a broad set of interests and expertise, ranging from high-performance computing and data portals, to software development for big data. While our computational activities and expertise focus on cancer, they also have broader application in genomic research. For example, Genome Informatics oversees the development of multiple websites for various Canadian and International research projects, such as the Ontario Health Study and the NCI Genomic Data Commons.
The Genome Informatics Program is involved in a wide variety of informatics projects. We play both leadership and collaborative, scientific roles in many large-scale computational initiatives, with a strong mandate to output to the scientific community open-source, open-access data, tools and resources.
Projects under the Genome Informatics Program include:
The International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC), where IBC housed the ICGC Secretariat and designed, built and maintained the ICGC Data Coordination Centre (ICGC DCC), a portal providing tools for visualizing, querying and downloading the data released by ICGC consortium members.
A unified data repository supporting the data sharing of several cancer genome programs at the NCI, including The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).
A unique research resource for childhood cancer and structural birth defects funded by the NIH and built by OICR in collaboration with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
A unique compute cloud-based biomedical research resource designed to make the extensive genomic holdings of the ICGC project available in convenient form to the cancer research community. Researchers can create a project and request an account on the compute cloud.
Developed by the Cancer Genome Collaboratory, is an open platform for sharing Docker-based tools described with the Common Workflow Language used by the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH).
In an international consortium that is generating novel human tumor-derived culture models, which are annotated with genomic and clinical data.