Sanger Institute’s COSMIC database expands cancer cloud capabilities at the Institute for Systems Biology

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute released this news on Feb. 20, 2017. See original release…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute’s Catalog of Somatic Mutations in Cancer (COSMIC) team announces a new agreement to provide their data to the U.S.-based Institute for Systems Biology (ISB).

COSMIC is an expert-curated cancer mutation database, and is the world’s largest and most comprehensive resource for exploring the impact of somatic mutations in human cancers.

With this agreement, ISB has embedded the COSMIC data within the ISB Cancer Genomics Cloud (CGC), which is a cloud-based platform that uses Google BigQuery technology to bring unprecedented computing power to researchers around the world.

Having COSMIC data within ISB-GCG (isb-cgc.org), which is funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute, enables new types of cloud-based and cloud-powered analyses across a number of resources, including The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).

COSMIC users can easily sign up via the COSMIC account page and documentation including examples is available to get people up and running quickly.

Dr. Simon Forbes, head of COSMIC, said: “It is hugely exciting to be able to embed our carefully and manually curated COSMIC data within ISB-CGC. This enables scientists to study mutation trends at high resolution and perform integrative analyses of COSMIC and TCGA data using unparalleled computed power”

Dr. Ilya Shmulevich, whose lab developed the ISB-CGC, said: “ISB has always valued open access to data. This agreement with COSMIC augments the ISB-CGC platform and makes it an even more useful resource for the cancer research community.”

-Ends-

Contact Details:

Dr Samantha Wynne
Press Office, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Cambridgeshire, CB10 1SA
Tel +44 (0)1223 492 368
Email: press.office@sanger.ac.uk

COSMIC – the Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer
A key resource underpinning cancer genetic research, COSMIC provides large high-quality datasets, methods and graphics to scrutinise the genetics causing this disease, giving insights to pharmaceutical design and patient therapies. Built within the world-leading Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (UK) to support global research, millions of mutations across thousands of diseases can be explored at http://cancer.sanger.ac.uk.

Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is one of the world’s leading genome centres. Through its ability to conduct research at scale, it is able to engage in bold and long-term exploratory projects that are designed to influence and empower medical science globally. Institute research findings, generated through its own research programmes and through its leading role in international consortia, are being used to develop new diagnostics and treatments for human disease. www.sanger.ac.uk.

Institute for Systems Biology
The Institute for Systems Biology is a non-profit biomedical research organization based in Seattle, Washington. It was founded in 2000 by systems biologist Leroy Hood, immunologist Alan Aderem, and protein chemist Ruedi Aebersold. ISB was established on the belief that the conventional models for exploring and funding breakthrough science have not caught up with the real potential of what is possible today. ISB serves as the ultimate environment where scientific collaboration stretches across disciplines and across academic and industrial organizations, where our researchers have the intellectual freedom to challenge the status quo, and where grand visions for breakthroughs in human health inspire a collective drive to achieve the seemingly impossible. Our core values ensure that we always keep our focus on the big ideas that eventually will have the largest impact on human health. ISB is an affiliate of Providence St. Joseph Health.