The Ontario Institute for Cancer Research Joins the Open Cloud Consortium

CHICAGO, Aug. 20, 2014 /CNW/ - The Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) and the Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) announced today that they have entered into a multi-year agreement that brings OICR into the OCC. OICR will be involved with several OCC Working Groups, including the Open Science Data Cloud Working Group and the Biomedical Commons Cloud Working Group, to build systems for cancer genomics analysis and biomedical data sharing.

OICR and OCC will collaborate together to create the Cancer Genome Collaboratory, a groundbreaking project to allow researchers authorized by the National Institutes of Health and the International Cancer Genome Consortium to perform computational analysis over cancer genomics data sets in a secure and regulatory-compliant fashion. It builds upon the Bionimbus Protected Data Cloud, which currently provides access to genomics data sets from The Cancer Genome Atlas. The Biomedical Commons Cloud Working Group will take the technology and lessons learned operating the Bionimbus Protected Data Cloud and apply them to a larger open source infrastructure for medical and healthcare data that spans multiple research organizations. "Cancer genomics data sets are now too large to download over the Internet, and the compute resources needed to mine them for knowledge are out of reach for many researchers. Our collaboration will enable researchers from around the world to get the data, perform sophisticated analyses over it, and to extract knowledge that can be used to improve cancer diagnosis and care," said Dr. Lincoln Stein, Director of the Informatics and Bio-computing Program at OICR.

"The Biomedical Commons Cloud (BCC) provides a medical research center a quick and easy way to get access to a secure and compliant cloud that contains a critical mass of biomedical data," said Dr. Robert Grossman, Director of the OCC. "We are very excited that OICR will be one of the founding partners of this effort."

For more information about OICR, visit: oicr.on.ca

For more information about joining the Open Cloud Consortium and its expanding membership roster, go to: www.opencloudconsortium.org/members

About the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
OICR is an innovative cancer research and development institute dedicated to prevention, early detection, diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The Institute is an independent, not-for-profit corporation, supported by the Government of Ontario. OICR's research supports more than 1,700 investigators, clinician scientists, research staff and trainees located at its headquarters and in research institutes and academia across the Province of Ontario. OICR has key research efforts underway in small molecules, biologics, stem cells, imaging, genomics, informatics and bio-computing.

About the Open Cloud Consortium
The Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) is a not for profit that manages and operates cloud computing infrastructure to support scientific, medical, health care and environmental research.  OCC members span the globe and include universities, private companies, and government agencies and national laboratories.

SOURCE: Ontario Institute for Cancer Research

Contacts

Ontario Institute for Cancer Research:

Hal Costie
[email protected]
416-673-7921 (office)
@OICR_news

MaRS Centre
661 University Avenue, Suite 510
Toronto, Ontario
Canada, M5G 0A3

Open Cloud Consortium:

Walt Wells
[email protected]
Open Cloud Consortium:
400 Lathrop Avenue
River Forest IL 60305