A Laboratory-Targeted, Data Management and Processing System for the Early Detection Research Network

Abstract

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Cancer Institute's Early Detection Research Network (EDRN) is a cross-institutional collaborative initiative seeking to accelerate the clinical application of cancer biomarker research. Over the past decade, it has been our role, as EDRN's Informatics Center (IC), to develop a comprehensive information services infrastructure as well as a set of software tools and services to support this overall initiative. We have recently developed a novel application called the Laboratory Catalog and Archive Service (LabCAS) whose focus is to extend EDRN IC data management and processing capabilities to EDRN laboratories. By leveraging the same technologies used to manage and process NASA Earth and Planetary data sets, we offer EDRN researchers an effective way of managing their laboratory data. More specifically, LabCAS enables EDRN researchers to reliably archive their experimental data, to optionally share these data in a controlled manner with other researchers, and to gain insight into these data through highly configurable data analysis pipelines tailored to the broad range of biomarker related experiments. This particular collaboration leverages expertise from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Dartmouth Medical School, as well as builds upon existing cross-governmental collaboration between NASA and the NIH.