UC DAVIS CANCER CENTER TAKES PART IN NATIONAL EFFORT TO BUILD “WORLD WIDE WEB” OF CANCER RESEARCH

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — UC Davis Cancer Center is partnering with the National Cancer Institute to build the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG), a virtual network intended to link individuals and institutions around the world in hopes of accelerating cancer research.

UC Davis is among 49 NCI-designated cancer centers to have signed contracts with the NCI to build the ambitious grid, envisioned as a free, voluntary network open to anyone who wants to use it. Planners predict caBIG will enable investigators to answer research questions more rapidly and efficiently than ever before, by centralizing and sharing data from tissue banks, pathology studies, clinical trials and other biomedical research.

“This is a critical time in cancer research, and caBIG is the infrastructure that will allow us to attain our research goals,” says Ralph deVere White, associate dean for cancer programs at UC Davis School of Medicine and Medical Center and director of the UC Davis Cancer Center. “Cancer patients, and the public at large, will be the most important beneficiaries.” UC Davis researchers are charged with helping to write a common language for the pioneering network. UC Davis is also responsible for helping to determine how collaborators nationwide will communicate and share progress during caBIG’s development.

Three other California institutions also have contracts to build caBIG: UC San Francisco, UC Irvine and the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center in Duarte, north of Los Angeles.

David Rocke, a professor of biostatistics, and Cecil Lynch, an assistant professor of medical informatics, lead the caBIG effort at UC Davis.

“The way cancer research is conducted stands to change dramatically with caBIG," Lynch says. “By allowing researchers to rapidly discover related projects being conducted across the country and world, caBIG will help facilitate collaborative efforts that will accelerate the pace of cancer research."

Adds Rocke: “CaBIG will ensure cancer research and treatment are more uniformly state-of-the-art nationally and internationally.”

Andrew C. von Eschenbach, director of the NCI, has dubbed the project the World Wide Web of cancer research. “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,” he says.

“It will enable members of the cancer research community to work well as a community, where the whole becomes truly greater than the sum of its parts.”

UC Davis Cancer Center is the nation’s 61st NCI-designated cancer center. The UC Davis Integrated Cancer Research Program unites the efforts of more than 180 scientists on the UC Davis Medical Center campus in Sacramento, the UC Davis campus in Davis, and at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. Members include cancer investigators in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and the College of Engineering, among many other departments, programs and centers.