ISB Gets $3.4M NIH Extension for Cancer Genomics Cloud

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

ISB Receives $3.4 Million Extension to NIH Contract to Continue Development of ‘Cancer Genomics Cloud’ with Google and CSRA

SEATTLE, Oct. 21, 2016 – Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) has received a $3.4 million, one-year extension to an existing federally-funded contract from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH). This follows the completion of the initial two-year, $6.5 million contract during which ISB developed the ISB-CGC, a cloud-based platform that serves as a large-scale data repository and includes both interactive and programmatic interfaces, as well as the computational infrastructure necessary to carry out cancer genomics research at an unprecedented scale. With the additional funding, the ISB-CGC team, which includes partners at Google, Inc., and CSRA, will be able to extend the platform to include new data sets and new data types, in particular diagnostic images and proteomics data.

ISB-CGC already includes over 1 petabyte (PB) of data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project. The data and tools that the ISB-CGC platform provide, together with the compute power of the Google Cloud, have made TCGA data more accessible and more usable than ever before. The amount of data hosted by ISB-CGC will more than double during the extension year as additional data from the NCI Genomic Data Commons (GDC) is added to the current data set.

The NCI also awarded extensions to the Broad Institute and Seven Bridges Genomics.

FUNDING: This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Contract No. HHSN261201400007C

ABOUT INSTITUTE FOR SYSTEMS BIOLOGY: The Institute for Systems Biology is a nonprofit 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 Health & Services.

Media contact:
Hsiao-Ching Chou
Director of Communications
Institute for Systems Biology
hchou@systemsbiology.org