It is the goal of the CGR team at the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) to identify genes and their associated networks that are important in cancer. Bioinformatics analyses are used to translate genetic and genomic observations into insights concerning cancer etiology. To this end, the team has developed and is continuing to develop bioinformatics tools and methods to support systems analysis of human cancer.

Current technology permits genome-wide generation of multidimensional molecular data assessing copy number alterations, nucleotide substitutions, insertion/deletions, rearrangements, and epigenetic changes. Furthermore, next generation sequencing technology provides complete gene and genome sequence. The CBIIT CGR team has created approaches and tools to integrate, display, and interpret these diverse, systems-wide data generated by the next generation sequencing. Requires a robust systems platform to support their development, analysis and collaboration efforts

The CBIIT CGR team has provided tools, analytic capacity, and bioinformatics support to the specific groups in the Cancer Genome Atlas project (TCGA) and TARGET projects as well as investigators within NCI community. More specifically, the CBIIT CGR has leveraged its analytic pipelines to determine the quality of data submitted to the data coordinating centers and to computationally identify features for confirmation by other groups and validation in bench-based experiments. The team has performed the primary sequence analysis for the TARGET consortium. The results of this analysis have lead to clinical trials that leverage the laboratory’s findings. These collaborations have also assisted the team in identifying priority areas for bioinformatics development and the opportunity to refine and validate its analytic processes and tools.