NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital announced today that they have agreed to a full exchange of cancer mutation data.
The partners are aiming to accelerate research into the discovery of cancer-causing genetic mutations, and are hoping the data sharing may spur new drug discovery efforts.
The agreement calls for regular updates and information exchanges between the institutions. The data will also be freely available to any researcher who may need it. They will also make use of St. Jude's ProteinPaint tool — which was developed to better visualize pediatric mutations among other genes and proteins with the goal of using genomic data to make more accurate diagnoses and develop precision therapies — and the Sanger's Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer (COSMIC) — which has more than 4.1 million mutations and is designed to store and display somatic mutation information.
"We want this to be the definitive resource for genomic information for the pediatric cancer community," Jinghui Zhang, chair of the computational biology department at St. Jude, said in a statement. "This collaboration will allow us to share data across two institutions to better understand, using our combined knowledge, what causes cancer."
Simon Forbes, head of COSMIC, added that because many of the database's users are involved in diagnostic and pharmaceutical discovery, the data-sharing partnership with St Jude could also bolster those efforts.