CHICAGO (GenomeWeb) – The Jackson Laboratory and biomedical data analysis technology vendor Seven Bridges are teaming up to build a platform for coordinating research with patient-derived tumor xenograft data sets. The National Cancer Institute is funding the effort with a $2 million grant.
Jax and Seven Bridges will establish and host what NCI has dubbed the PDX Data Commons and Coordinating Center in hopes of accelerating PDX-based translational research. The Data Commons and Coordinating Center will support a wider NCI project called PDXNet, a planned network to coordinate wide-scale PDX testing for preclinical cancer drugs.
The two partners said they would apply cloud computing and bioinformatics technologies to organize analysis of PDX studies underway at NCI and other research institutions, such as Washington University, the University of Utah, Baylor College of Medicine, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and the Wistar Institute. They also will seek to build interoperability between PDXNet and other major NCI datasets in the Seven Bridges-developed Cancer Genomic Cloud, including the Cancer Genome Atlas, Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET), and the Cancer Imaging Archive.
"Translational cancer research generates vast amounts of data that need to be stored and analyzed, and PDX trials represent one of the best preclinical platforms we have to realize the potential presented by precision oncology," Seven Bridges CEO Brandi Davis-Dusenbery said in a statement. "Making this data easily accessible to researchers is imperative to improving outcomes for cancer patients."