NCI Cancer Research Data Commons: Lessons Learned and Future State

Abstract

More than ever, scientific progress in cancer research hinges on our ability to combine datasets and extract meaningful interpretations to better understand diseases and ultimately inform the development of better treatments and diagnostic tools. To enable the successful sharing and use of big data, the NCI developed the Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC), providing access to a large, comprehensive, and expanding collection of cancer data. The CRDC is a cloud-based data science infrastructure that eliminates the need for researchers to download and store large-scale datasets by allowing them to perform analysis where data reside. Over the past 10 years, the CRDC has made significant progress in providing access to data and tools along with training and outreach to support the cancer research community. In this review, we provide an overview of the history and the impact of the CRDC to date, lessons learned, and future plans to further promote data sharing, accessibility, interoperability, and reuse. See related articles by Brady et al., p. 1384, Wang et al., p. 1388, and Pot et al., p. 1396.

Figure 1.

The NCI's CRDC, an expandable infrastructure. The CRDC is a cloud-based network of data type–specific data commons: GDC, PDC, IDC, and ICDC, as well as a data type agnostic commons, the CDS. Through a secure authentication and authorization process, users can access cancer data and hosted tools via APIs and web interfaces. Users can also harness the elastic compute capabilities of the cloud for computational analyses, visualization of results, and data queries in addition to bringing their own data and tools to their workspaces in the NCI Cloud Resources.

Figure 2.

NCI CRDC statistics and impact. The full impact on cancer research the CRDC has had since its launch in 2014. The CRDC provides access to nearly 10 petabytes of cancer data from over 350 studies and 134K subjects. It also provides more than 2K on-demand computational analysis tools and workflows in secure, collaborative cloud workspaces and over 82K users have performed 2.4K years of compute, resulting in 30K data citations.