“This is good news in the fight against cancer. With the launch of this new national resource, anyone can freely access raw genomic and clinical data for 12,000 patients – with more records to follow. Increasing the pool of researchers who can access data and decreasing the time it takes for them to review and find new patterns in that data is critical to speeding up development of lifesaving treatments for patients.”
-Vice President Joe Biden
Making a decade’s worth of progress in five years in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer – the goal of the Cancer Moonshot launched by the President in his 2016 State of the Union Address and led by Vice President Joe Biden – will take all resources possible, and data is a particularly valuable one.
Today, in support of making research data freely accessible, the Vice President will visit the University of Chicago to mark the public release of the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Genomic Data Commons (GDC), a first-of-its-kind public data platform for storing, analyzing, and sharing genomic and associated clinical data on cancer. The GDC creates a foundational system for broad sharing and analysis of tumor genome sequences (the DNA unique to cancer cells), which is critical for advancing the field of precision medicine and improving the care of cancer patients, and is designed with appropriate privacy and security protections.
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