A cache of brain cancer biomedical data has been made freely available to researchers worldwide, say researchers at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. The dataset, Repository for Molecular Brain Neoplasia Data, also known as REMBRANDT, hosted and supported by Georgetown, is one of only two such large collections in the country.
Information about the brain cancer data collection, which contains information on 671 adult patients collected from 14 contributing institutions, is detailed in Scientific Data, an open-access journal.
Already, thousands of researchers in the U.S. and internationally log on to the data site on a daily basis, and word about the resource is expected to increase its use, says Subha Madhavan, chief data scientist at Georgetown University Medical Center and director of the Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics at Georgetown Lombardi.
The Georgetown data resource is unique in several ways. One is that it contains genomic information, collected from volunteer patients who allowed their tumors to be sampled, as well as diagnostic (including brain scans), treatment and outcomes data. Most collections contain either one or the other.
“We want this data to be widely used by the broadest audience — the entire biomedical research community — so that imagination and discovery is maximized,” says first author on the paper Yuriy Gusev, associate professor and a faculty member of the ICBI. “Our common goal is to tease apart the clues hidden within this biomedical and clinical information in order to find ways that advance diagnostic and clinical outcomes for these patients.”
The REMBRANDT dataset was originally created at the National Cancer Institute and funded by Glioma Molecular Diagnostic Initiative led by co-authors Howard Fine, from New York Presbyterian Hospital, and Jean-Claude Zenklusen, from the NCI. They collected the data from 2004 to 2006.
NCI transferred the data to Georgetown in 2015, and it is now physically located on the Georgetown Database of Cancer, a cancer data integration and sharing platform for hosting alongside other cancer studies. G-DOC investigators, led by Madhavan, developed novel analytical tools to process the information anew.
The genomic data includes the specific genes within individual tumors that are either over-expressed or under-expressed as well as the number of times that gene is repeated within a chromosome. The data collection also includes information on RNA.
REMBRANDT includes genomic data from 261 samples of glioblastoma, 170 of astrocytoma, 86 tissues of oligodendroglioma, and a number that are mixed or of an unknown subclass. Outcomes data include more than 13,000 data points.
Additional co-authors of the work are Krithika Bhuvaneshwar, from Georgetown and Lei Song, from the National Cancer Institute.
Georgetown has filed a patent application related to G-DOC technology. Madhavan is the named inventor of the intellectual property protected.
The project was funded by the Georgetown Lombardi cancer center support grant (P30 CA51008) and a contract from the NCI to migrate the Rembrandt dataset to G-DOC.
