Cancer Bioinformatics Grid (caBIG)

The Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center has been funded to participate in the NCI Cancer Bioinformatics Grid (caBIG(tm)) initiative during the pilot phase (2004-2007) and the current enterprise deployment phase. caBIG(tm) aims to accelerate research discoveries and improve patient outcomes by linking researchers, physicians, and patients throughout the cancer community via an interoperable, world-wide-web-like, information grid.

The Cancer Center has been a funded participant in the caBIG(tm) Clinical Trial Management Systems Workspace. The completed projects include:

• The adoption of the Cancer Centralized Clinical Database (C3D) and Oracle Clinical 4.5 as an Application Service Provider (ASP) service hosted by the National Cancer Institute Center for Bioinformatics (NCICB) to manage clinical trial data
• The adoption of Cancer Centralized Clinical Participant Registry (C3PR) release 1.1 locally to manage clinical trial participants registry
• Co-chair the Best Practice Special Interest Group in the development of over 30 Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to support clinical research trials lifecycle, including: study planning, set-up, execution and reporting. The SOPs are compliant with FDA regulations and ICH Guidelines, and serve as the regulatory guidelines for the caBIG(tm) community

Ongoing caBIG deployment projects include:

1. Deploy a functional caGrid node
2. Deploy a caBIG-compliant clinical trial management system
3. Deploy caTissue

caBIG(tm) serves as an ideal model for the UC Irvine medical informatics initiative as it articulates an interoperability paradigm and offers common tools and infrastructures across diverse domains. The Cancer Center will collaborate with the ICTS in implementing the caBIG(tm) model at UC Irvine beyond oncology research.