Booz Allen’s cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG™) virtual infrastructure brings together data, research tools, standards, scientists, and organizations to fight cancer.
Improving cancer prevention, detection, and care are what caBIG™ is all about. It’s a part of Booz Allen’s multi-year contract with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that is reducing technical and collaborative barriers. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) considers caBIG™ a key enabler of its vision to eliminate cancer-related suffering and death.
Booz Allen assisted the NCI with developing the program in collaboration with 50 NCI cancer centers and 30 other organizations. Booz Allen oversees the development of caBIG™ and provides management, strategy and technology. Our responsibilities include developing the architecture to support collection, sharing, and analysis of data for a broad community of cancer researchers: institutions, registries, pharmaceutical and biotech industries, and sub-disciplines of clinical and research informatics.
At the outset, Booz Allen brought researchers and senior NCI leadership together to identify the tools needed to standardize research and improve collaboration. The firm also helped researchers who contributed by creating the tools necessary to maximize the utility of caBIG™. This important step, often overlooked in other projects of this kind, helped provide an important bridge between users and developers of the software.
Since its inception, caBIG™ has helped foster connections throughout the cancer research community, including cancer centers, federal, academic, not-for-profit, and industry organizations. That synergy of scientists, industry, and organizations has been the driving force for generating 40 new products, including biomedical tools, datasets, and infrastructure such as the Cancer Tissue Database (caTISSUE) already used by non-cancer researchers.
NIH is studying caBIG™ as a model for other medical research informatics initiatives. Expanding the use of caBIG™-like programs could help medical scientists identify promising research results and thereby expedite the transfer of knowledge from the lab to the patient’s bedside. This will close the gap between cancer research and treatment.
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