Creating the eScientist Portal: 3 Clicks or Less to Accelerating Research
Challenge
In the field of biomedical research, scientists are gaining unprecedented access to a massive and rapidly-growing treasure trove of biological and clinical data to fuel their discoveries. This era of “Big Data” promises to accelerate research and to make it more productive, but data are often hard to access, harder to integrate and analyze, and nearly impossible to disseminate and share. Sadly, data not used are data wasted.
Over the past seven years, the National Cancer Institute’s caBIG® informatics initiative has sought to address this issue by developing a standards-based network to allow researchers to transfer data seamlessly between researchers in one institution as well as among multiple collaborating research teams at different institutions. While the caBIG® infrastructure was designed to facilitate cancer research, it is also applicable to other diseases where data can be a powerful engine to drive discoveries.
Many biologists, however, are not experienced with the jargon used in information technology or the bioinformatics resources that may be available to assist them with their research. So, the NCI faced the significant challenge of communicating “IT tech talk” in a way that would resonate with researchers, as well as quickly and easily provide scientists with access to relevant resources and data.
Approach
FKH developed the eScientist Portal a new web platform specifically designed to make it easy for life scientists and clinical trialists to find, access, and use a toolbox of resources to solve research problems. The objective was to get researchers what they needed within “3 clicks or less”.
This necessitated understanding the databases, standards, resources, and applications that were available—and where to find them—as well as how to communicate the relevance and benefit to researchers in a way that would resonate. Visitors to the site can self-identify by their field of science, the research challenge they face, or the solution they are seeking (i.e., conduct in silico research; search databases; manage microarray data; manage clinical trials, manage medical images, manage biospecimens, etc.)
Impact
The eScientist Portal brings the toolbox to the research user and overcomes the chasm between those who develop informatics and those who do bench science or clinical trials. This research portal now consolidates and provides access to:
- Applications that assist research in discovery and cancer biology and management of clinical trials and clinical research
- Portals where scientists can conduct research such as correlating genomic and expression data with clinical outcomes from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and other projects
- Key databases to search for protein sequences, genome annotations, signaling pathways, and models for human cancer
- Resources to help create, aggregate, and manage research data; facilitate data sharing and mapping; and support clinical trials data submission
- More than 4.4M publicly available medical images; nearly 550,000 SNPs for prostate and breast cancer; 16,000+ gene expression data arrays; ~7,000 annotated human genes; and 430 signaling pathways
The software engineers are pleased to see their work used productively, and researchers avoid wasted time, extra costs, and frustration. To try it yourself, log onto www.cabig.cancer.gov/escientist
