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OICR Joins Open Cloud Consortium to Expand Access to Cancer Genomics Data

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The Ontario Institute for Cancer Research has joined the Open Cloud Consortium (OCC), a non-profit that provides cloud infrastructure to support science communities, and the partners plan to create a cancer genomics resource.

The partners said that they plan to create the Cancer Genome Collaboratory, which will enable researchers authorized by the National Institutes of Health and the International Cancer Genome Consortium to analyze cancer genomics data sets securely and in compliance with regulations. The collaboratory will build upon the current Bionimbus Protected Data Cloud, which provides access to data sets from The Cancer Genome Atlas.

Under the multi-year agreement, OICR also will work with the OCC's Open Science Data Cloud Working Group and the Biomedical Commons Cloud (BCC) Working Group to build systems for cancer genomics analysis and data sharing.

The BCC group will take knowledge gained from the Bionimbus program and apply it in a larger open-source infrastructure for medical and healthcare data from multiple research organizations, OCC said.

"The [BCC] provides a medical research center a quick and easy way to get access to a secure and compliant cloud that contains a critical mass of biomedical data," OCC Director Robert Grossman said in a statement.

"Our collaboration will enable researchers from around the world to get the data, perform sophisticated analyses over it, and to extract knowledge that can be used to improve cancer diagnosis and care," added Lincoln Stein, director of OICR's Informatics and Bio-computing Program.

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