The National Cancer Institutes’s Center for Biomedical Information and Information Technology (CBIIT) is the agency behind CaBIG™ or Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid™.
What is CaBIG™ about? Essentially it is a global grid for cancer bioinformatics that the agency has been working to create since 2004. Following is an excerpt from the CaBIG™ Mission & Goals Page:
” CaBIG™ is an information network enabling all constituencies in the cancer community – researchers, physicians, and patients – to share data and knowledge. The mission of CaBIG™ is to develop a truly collaborative information network that accelerates the discovery of new approaches for the detection, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of cancer, ultimately improving patient outcomes.
The goals of CaBIG™ are to: connect scientists and practitioners through a shareable and interoperable infrastructure, develop standard rules and a common language to more easily share information, build or adapt tools for collecting, analyzing, integrating, and disseminating information associated with cancer research and care. “
” CaBIG™ is creating a common, extensible informatics platform that integrates diverse data types and supports interoperable analytic tools in areas including clinical trials management, tissue banks and pathology, imaging, and integrative cancer research.
Tools, Infrastructure, Data Resources used to support the CaBIG™ initiative can be accessed at: https://cabig.nci.nih.gov/inventory
This site has many layers and points of access to a highly complex subject matter. Happily for non-scientists, there are several introductory links on CaBIG™ which are really useful for getting an overview of what is available:
- CaBIG™ Welcome Page
- CaBIG™ Essentials: Self-Paced Training Program can be viewed here (Flash media player required).
- CaBIG™ Training Portal Page
- CaBIG™ Library page (link here) with many FAQ or articles about the broad purpose and utility of this resource.
- CaBIG™ Scientific Publications Page
- Here is a link where you can sign up for the CaBIG™ Listserv from NIH
Also see an article written by Kenneth Buetow was recently published in The New Scientist (Apr 4 2008 ) entitled “CaBIG™ - Headed for the Big Time” – which you can read – link here.
2 responses so far ↓
anonymous // June 16, 2009 at 9:57 PM
Is there a statistic of how many grants have been funded by the caBIG program?
creaky15 // June 17, 2009 at 11:13 AM
I looked around on the CaBIG website, but found no information about grants. If you wish to email the site administrators with your question, here is the address for e-mail inquiries: caBIGinfo@cancer.gov
Creaky