The National Institutes of Health‘s National Cancer Institute has launched the Genomic Data Commons, a unified system designed to store and facilitate sharing of cancer genomic and clinical data.GDC works to centralize and standardize data from The Cancer Genome Atlas and Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments programs, which house more than two petabytes of cancer genomic data from around the world, NCI said Monday.
NCI noted that data stored in and accessed from GDC will be kept secured and streamlined through standardized software tools that work to allow researchers to access and utilize cancer data.
“With the GDC, NCI has made a major commitment to maintaining long-term storage of cancer genomic data and providing researchers with free access to these data,” said Douglas Lowy, NCI acting director.
He added that GDC will help to further efforts in precision medicine.
The University of Chicago’s Center for Data Intensive Science and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research developed and handles GDC under an NCI contract with Leidos‘ biomedical research unit.
The data system is part of the National Cancer Moonshot program and the administration’s Precision Medicine Initiative.
