CancerGrid
Open standards for clinical cancer informatics.
The project website
The full project proposal
PDF poster
Open competition to design the project logo
The CancerGrid project will deliver modular, distributed software
solutions for the key problems of clinical cancer informatics:
clinical trial patient entry, randomisation and follow-up; storage and
analysis of complex datasets; linking trial and epidemiology data with
profiling information. It will facilitate trials management, and
future collaboration across international boundaries.
CancerGrid will deliver a working services-based Grid infrastructure
for cancer clinical trials. We will produce an implementation of the
well established trial protocols as network services. XML documents
containing trial protocol metadata will provide a basis for
computation across trials, automating meta-analysis and the
integration of trials and bioinformatics information.
A major barrier to the re-use of clinical data is the inconsistent use
of similar terminlogy; this makes it difficult to identify common
clinical entities in disparate information systems, and makes
automatic linking impossible. CancerGrid will remove this barrier
through the establishment of a consensus regarding domain-specific
vocabularies and data items.
A necessary requirement for developing open standards for clinical
cancer informatics is the development of collaborative environments to
allow researchers to quickly and transparently locate data and to
communicate with colleagues at remote sites. Building on our existing
achievements, CancerGrid will promote the use of Telemedicine to
co-ordinate clinical trials between the five distributed sites.
The project team includes medical oncologists, translational
researchers, computational biologists, and software engineers from
several leading institutions: Cambridge, Oxford, London, Birmingham,
and Belfast. The project will start in early 2005, but plans and
preparations are already underway.
