The caBIG ® Life Sciences Distribution

caBIG® is a virtual network of organizations developing and adopting interoperable databases and analytical tools to facilitate translational cancer research (von Eschenbach and Buetow 2007). It is an open-source, open-access program, and all the tools and resources are freely available to the research community. The National Cancer Institute is developing resources to assist enterprise-wide adoption of the caBIG® tools. To this end, we have bundled mature software tools together to facilitate easy adoption and installation. The Life Sciences Distribution (LSD) is comprised of tools to support the continuum of translational research: caArray, for the management and annotation of microarray data; caTissue, to support the collection, annotation, and distribution of biospecimens; the Clinical Trials Object Data System, for the sharing of clinical trials information; the National Biomedical Imaging Archive, for annotation, storage, and sharing of in vivo images; cancer Genome Wide Association Studies, for publishing and mining data from GWAS studies; and geWorkbench, supporting the integrated analysis and annotation of expression and sequence data. All the LSD tools are connected to caGrid (Saltz et al. 2006), which makes it possible for the databases at multiple institutions to be interconnected to support data sharing and integration.

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