A data portal called Cancer-Immu established by a team of Vanderbilt University Medical Center biostatisticians aims to help cancer clinicians and researchers predict which patients will respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors.
With data from 3,652 samples for 16 cancer types, Cancer-Immu is the largest immune checkpoint blockade-related data portal for exploring immunogenomic connections.
The team provided details about the open-access portal in a paper published Dec. 13 in Cancer Research. Cancer-Immu integrates large-scale multidimensional omics data, including genetic, bulk, and single-cell transcriptomic, proteomic, and dynamic genomic profiles. It also integrates clinical phenotypes.
The cancer types in the data portal include melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer, metastatic urothelial cancer, renal cell carcinoma, bladder cancer, glioma, colorectal cancer, head and neck cancer, esophagogastric cancer, cancer of unknown primary cause, gastric cancer, breast cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma, prostate cancer, basal cell carcinoma, and non-melanoma skin cancer.
With the Cancer-Immu portal, clinicians and researchers can upload and analyze their own data or co-analyze with existing data simultaneously.
They can use either a meta-analysis or a pan-cancer analysis. The portal has collections of three types of omics data: genetic, transcriptomics, and single-cell data. The pan-cancer module, which aggregates multiple datasets into one, enhances the detection and analysis of rare features.
The biostatisticians noted in the study that while meta-analysis failed to detect significant gene mutations, the pan-cancer analysis detected 182 genes with mutations significantly associated with immune checkpoint inhibitors.
