[sc-announce] caBIG: sharing data to save lives - Science Commons blog
Kaitlin Thaney
kaitlin at creativecommons.org
Wed Apr 9 11:38:27 EDT 2008
http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/04/09/cabig-sharing-data-to-save-lives/
caBIG: sharing data to save lives
April 9th, 2008<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/04/09/cabig-sharing-data-to-save-lives/>by
dwentworth
*The Scientist* <http://www.the-scientist.com/> has a not-to-be-missed piece
this month on the National Cancer Institute's
caBIG<https://cabig.nci.nih.gov/>,
the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid. The article, *Heading for the BIG
Time* <http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/54501/> (free
registration required), was written by caBIG founder Kenneth
Buetow<http://ccr.cancer.gov/staff/staff.asp?profileid=5535>,
and serves as an excellent introduction to the reasons why we need a
collaborative
infrastructure<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/03/24/whats-cyberinfrastructure/>for
knowledge sharing in science — one that works, to use Buetow's phrase,
as a "smart World Wide Web" for research.
"From my position as a senior cancer researcher at the NCI, groundbreaking
observations and insights in biomedicine are accumulating at a dizzying
rate. However, from the perspective of the approximately 1.4 million US
patients who will hear their physicians say, 'You have cancer,' progress is
unacceptably slow," explains Buetow. "Something needed to be done to
expedite the transformation of scientific findings into clinical solutions."
That's a daunting challenge, says Buetow, especially given the nature of the
disease and the way research is currently done. "Cancer is an immensely
complex disease, and in order to get a sense of the big picture, scientists
need to combine observations from genomics, proteomics, pathology, imaging
and clinical trials," he says. "There was, however, no systematic way to do
this."
The caBIG solution: figuring out what kinds of data could be shared, and
then connecting more than 60 NCI centers of cancer research using a strategy
of "standards-based interoperability," where information is shared and
accessed using common standards and tools. The results so far are promising:
the caBIG community is growing, and people are already adding new tools that
increase the utility of the shared data.
We're proud to have been a part of the NCI's ongoing discussions about
intellectual property and data sharing recently, as well. John
Wilbanks<http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/wilbanks/>was a
closing panelist at the most recent Data Sharing and Intellectual
Capital meeting of the Grid. We look forward to continuing - and deepening -
our relationship with the Grid over the coming months.
--
--------------------------------------
Kaitlin Thaney
Project Manager
Science Commons, a project of Creative Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
http://creativecommons.org
kaitlin at creativecommons.org
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