Delivering impact to Australian Researchers by participating in a Global Data Commons
Note: Phase one of this activity completed in 2021.
The Zero Childhood Cancer (ZCC) consortium now routinely utilise the Cavatica analysis platform (hosted on secure cloud infrastructure in Australia and accessible to local institutional data storage) to support the analysis of paediatric cancer genomics data. Identical analyses from rare paediatric cancer cases are now possible across both the ZCC consortium in Australia and the KidsFirst consortium in the USA. Watch the recording to the right for more information.
The NIH Data Commons is a transformative US-funded effort to accelerate biomedical discovery by providing a cloud-based platform where investigators can store, share, access, and compute on digital objects relating to human health research including data, software, and workflows.
Disease does not respect national boundaries and biomedical research (especially on rare diseases) often benefits from access to larger cohorts of participants, which need to be recruited from different countries/jurisdictions.
Cloud based infrastructure (e.g. the Cavatica cloud-based platform for collaboratively accessing, sharing, and analysing paediatric cancer data) being developed through the NIH Data Commons represents a technical solution to help researchers everywhere to actively undertake global research collaborations.
Specific topics within this program of work include:
understanding how we can connect the compute, analysis and data requirements of Australian-based research programs programs such as Zero Childhood Cancer with the US-based (and NIH Data Commons supported) Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Program (Kids First), through exploring the Kids First-developed large-scale data resource that provides access to tools and data for researchers to uncover new insights into the biology of childhood cancer.
Project partners and contributors
