A national virtual specimen database for early cancer detection

Access to biospecimens is essential for enabling cancer biomarker discovery. The National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Early Detection Research Network (EDRN) comprises and integrates a large number of cancer research institutions into a network in order to establish a collaborative scientific environment to discover and validate disease markers. The diversity of both the institutions and the collaborative focus has created the need for establishing cross-disciplinary teams focused on integrating expertise in cancer research, computational and biostatistics, and computer science. Given the collaborative design of the network, the EDRN needed an informatics infrastructure. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the National Cancer Institute, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) teamed up to build an informatics infrastructure creating a collaborative, science-driven research environment despite the geographic and morphologic differences of the information systems that existed within the diverse network. EDRN investigators identified the need to share biospecimen data captured across the country managed in disparate databases. As a result, the informatics team initiated an effort to create a virtual biospecimen database whereby scientists could search and retrieve details about specimens located at collaborating institutions. Each database, however, was locally implemented and integrated into collection processes and methods unique to each institution. This meant that efforts to integrate databases needed to be done in a manner that did not require redesign or re-implementation of existing systems.