NCI-DOE Collaboration: Advanced Computing Solutions in Cancer Research

The National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis (DCTD) and the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research (FNLCR) are participating in an interagency collaboration with the Department of Energy (DOE). NCI's Center for Bioinformatics and Information Technology is serving as the point-of-contact for the overall collaboration with DOE, and DOE is the lead agency for this initiative. The collaboration fulfills part of the National Strategic Computing Initiative Presidential Order and aligns with the Precision Medicine Initiative Presidential Order. The overall DOE/NCI collaboration involves three pilot efforts to advance cancer research through the development of Exascale computing capabilities. The DCTD-specific effort, "Patient Level Pilot: Modeling for Pre-Clinical Screening," involves developing large-scale data and predictive models based on experimental data derived from patient-derived xenographs. DCTD is currently developing a repository of Patient-Derived Models from which the Exascale computing efforts will draw data. A goal of the collaboration is to create predictive models to recommend therapies for patients. NCI's February 17, 2016 Cancer Currents blog by Warren Kibbe, PhD, describes the collaborative efforts in further detail.