Cloud-Based Multimodal Data Analysis Software for the Cancer Research Data Commons

Fast-Track proposals will be accepted. Direct-to-Phase II proposals will be accepted. Number of anticipated awards: 3-5 Budget (total costs, per award): Phase I: up to $400,000 for up to 12 months Phase II: up to $2,000,000 for up to 2 years PROPOSALS THAT EXCEED THE BUDGET OR PROJECT DURATION LISTED ABOVE MAY NOT BE FUNDED. Summary The cancer research field has become intensely focused on the generation of high-throughput datasets to better understand cancer and, ultimately, to inform the development of better treatment and prevention tools. NIH and NCI have supported numerous programs, including The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA), Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatment (TARGET), Clinical Proteomic Tumor Atlas Consortium (CPTAC), and Human Tumor Atlas Network (HTAN) to generate a wealth of multi-modal data to be leveraged by the cancer research community. However, we are still limited in our ability to draw insights and meaningful interpretations from these datasets, which include multi-omics, imaging, and clinical data, by challenges in integration across disparate datasets. To address these challenges, NCI has created the Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) as part of the National Cancer Data Ecosystem recommended by the Cancer MoonshotSM Blue Ribbon Panel. The CRDC brings together data with cloud computing infrastructure to provide secure access to various data types across scientific domains which allows users to analyze, share, and store results by leveraging the storage and elastic compute of the cloud. This contract topic will support commercial sector participation to develop novel and impactful commercial analytic tools for the cancer research community that integrate CRDC multimodal data. The SBIR contract funding mechanism will offer the opportunity for small businesses to contribute solutions to address unmet challenges of big data analysis that are not currently provided by existing tools in the CRDC through the development of tools and resources that integrate into the rapidly evolving CRDC. Through this contract topic, NCI seeks to enable engagement of the CRDC community by offering enhanced data analysis capabilities, visualization tools, and data access and sharing platforms to enhance users' ability to make data-driven discoveries.