Awardees
Advancing Risk-Based Breast Cancer Screening and Surveillance (The Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium, BCSC), Diana Miglioretti
The Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium (BCSC) form a collaborative network of breast imaging registries that annually link tumor and pathology registries for research to assess and improve the delivery and quality of breast cancer screening. The BCSC currently shares five publicly available, immediately downloadable, de-identified datasets via their website and estimates that they have been downloaded over 9,300 times by users from more than 80 countries.
Integrative Analysis of Lung Cancer Etiology and Risk, Christopher Amos
Established in 2017, Dr. Christopher Amos and the Integrative Analysis of Lung Cancer Etiology and Risk team aim to identify risk factors at each step of lung cancer development to understand the mechanisms influencing progression and to identify biomarkers for early detection. Through these efforts the team has contributed many datasets to the database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP) and the catalog of human genome-wide association studies (GWAS Catalog) repositories. The team also developed a data enclave at Baylor College of Medicine and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and these enclaves are available to the research community for accessing and analyzing the individual-level data that has been harmonized from over 80 studies, with over 125,000 lung cancer patients, 204,000 controls, and 1,000,000 cohort participants. Over 120 publications have used these data resources.
The California Teachers Study (CTS), James Lacey
The CTS, a cohort study founded in 1995, collected consented health and behavior information from over 133,000 teachers and administrators who are members of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS). Starting in 2015, Dr. James Lacey led efforts to improve sharing for this important cohort data. Now CTS data is available to the research community through a secure cloud-based researcher platform that is open to all investigators, facilitates collaboration, protects participant data, and improves the efficiency of data access. Overall, more than 200 academic publications have used CTS data.
Up for a Challenge (U4C) – Stimulating Innovation in Breast Cancer Genetic Epidemiology, Christopher Haiman, Esther John, Peter Kraft, Sara Lindstroem, Wei Zheng, and Elad Ziv
Launched by the NCI (Drs. Elizabeth Gillanders and Leah Mechanic) in 2015, the U4C prize was designed to advance NIH’s focused efforts on rigor and reproducibility, as well as inspire novel, cross-disciplinary approaches to uncovering the genomic basis of breast cancer. For the challenge, three previously unavailable and diverse datasets were shared by Drs. Christopher Haiman, Esther John, Peter Kraft, Sara Lindstroem, Wei Zheng, and Elad Ziv. The datasets offered researchers access to previously underrepresented, non-European populations and enabled cross-ethnic analyses to explore critical questions that were uniquely addressable through cross-ancestry comparisons. By promoting broad access to breast cancer genetic epidemiology data, the U4C prize and the underlying shared data accelerated research and drove meaningful discoveries in a remarkably short time. Collectively, access to these unique studies has been approved for over 280 researchers since their addition to dbGaP.
Affiliations for the Fireside Chat participants:
Chris Amos is Head of Data Science Initiatives and Associate Director for Population and Data Science at the University of New Mexico
Chris Haiman is Professor of Preventive Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC). He leads the Cancer Epidemiology Program at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Epidemiology and Genetics division in the USC Department of Preventive Medicine.
Esther John is Professor of Epidemiology & Population Health and of Medicine (Division of Oncology) at Stanford University
Peter Kraft is Director of the Trans-Divisional Research Program in the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute
Jim Lacey is Director of the Division of Health Analytics within the Department of Computational and Quantitative Medicine at the Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope
Sara Lindstroem is Associate Professor and Director of Research in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health
Diana Miglioretti is Professor and Division Chief of Biostatistics in the UC Davis School of Medicine's Department of Public Health Sciences and an Affiliate Investigator at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute.
Wei Zheng is the Anne Potter Wilson Professor in Medicine, Department of Medicine, VUMC; Director, Vanderbilt Epidemiology Center; and Associate Director for Population Science Research, Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center
Elad Ziv Is Professor, Department of Medicine, University of California at San Francisco