Childhood Cancer Targeted By Sanger Institute And St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Data-Sharing Agreement

By Bio-IT World Staff

September 19, 2016 | The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is combining the power of COSMIC, its large-scale cancer genetics database, with ProteinPaint data mining and visualization system at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN, to support the discovery and understanding of genetic mutations in pediatric cancers. 

The agreement will provide regular updates and exchanges of cancer mutation data between both institutions to ensure the best support for research in all areas of childhood cancer, and will be freely available to researchers in all areas of science.

To characterize the genetic variants responsible for driving cancer formation in children, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital sequences the DNA from hundreds of childhood tumors. Their new system to explore this data, ProteinPaint, has been carefully designed to provide simple and easy ways to visualize and understand such large quantities of information.

The challenge is to identify which genetic variations are playing an active role in driving cancer development and which are there by chance - simply passengers along for the ride. It is only by comparing the childhood tumor genomes with many other tumor genomes that the “cancer drivers” can be separated from the “passengers”.

To enable such large-scale comparison, the Sanger Institute developed COSMIC - the Catalogue of Somatic Mutations In Cancer - an expert-curated database describing the wide variety of genetic variations associated with all forms of human cancer. COSMIC has been developed and maintained for more than 12 years and contains data on more than 4 million mutations.