Q & A with Devjani Chatterjee, Center Deployment Lead, Kimmel Cancer Center, Thomas Jefferson University
Why did your organization decide to connect to caBIG®? What specific IT and research challenges do you hope to address through your deployment of caBIG®?
The Informatics Core at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University (TJU) has either developed in-house or purchased software for our cancer researchers for many years. This work has given us a great appreciation for the scope of the projects being undertaken by caBIG®, and what those projects mean for us: the ability to obtain state-of-the-art, interoperable applications for our investigators. The deployment of caBIG® applications also allow our investigators to meet their data sharing responsibilities as NIH-funded researchers.
What caBIG® tools did you install as part of your deployment, and how are they being used?
To date, TJU has deployed caTissue (from the Tissue/Biospecimen Banking and Technology Tool Suite) and the Patient Study Calendar (part of the Clinical Trials Management System).
caTissue is being used in production at TJU, and those data are available on caGrid. The data in caTissue is comprised of de-identified records of biospecimens collected and stored in various bio-repositories at TJU and made available for research purposes. These biospecimen records are upgraded periodically.
The Patient Study Calendar is being used in “real-time” for several clinical trials, as our Clinical Research Associates work with the developers to address final stage production environment details.
What are the greatest challenges you encountered during deployment, and how did you work to resolve those challenges? Do you have advice for others who are ready to “get connected” through caBIG®?
We encountered two main challenges during deployment. First, we needed to convince our internal stakeholders-such as tissue bankers, clinical trial managers, and others-to change their workflows and accept a different style of data collection and annotation. We also needed to educate investigators, institutional IRBs, and IT departments on the importance of caBIG® goals and convince them to support the principle and practice of sharing data.
Our advice to new centers is to make extensive use of the Knowledge Centers, which are an excellent source of information and assistance. For example, the DSIC Knowledge Center has sample documents and guidelines which can assist individuals responsible in deploying caBIG® in dealing with their IRB's regulatory concerns or investigators' proprietary concerns.
How has caBIG® changed how research is conducted at your institution?
Using caBIG® tools, such as caTissue, has helped us standardize our data collection. For example, Clinical/Pathological diagnoses and annotations are now standardized using the SNOMED and CAP Protocols. This standardization means that we will be acquiring all the data our researchers need in a well-defined context. With the imminent deployment of caTissue Suite v1.1, researchers will be able to perform complex queries on this data to find and order biospecimens for their research. An added benefit is that the Suite offers "canned queries" that eliminate the need for researchers to invest large amounts of their time learning how to perform these searches.
Similarly for clinical research in the case of Patient Study Calendar, clinical trials operational management can be automated using a well-defined standard environment. Our Clinical Research Associates can use this caBIG® application to easily track participants' compliance with the trial schema and can modify participant activities as needed.
What are your long-term goals for using caBIG® at your organization?
Our long-term over-arching goals at KCC-TJU are: use caBIG® to integrate research with its clinical applications; and provide connectivity to all research data pertaining to cancer-both intra-institutionally and over the Grid. This translates into the intermediate and longer-term goals of completing our deployment of Tissue Banks and Pathology Tools (TBPT) and Clinical Trials Management Tools (CTMS), as well as Integrated Cancer Research (ICR) tools, such as caArray. An associated goal is to continue to educate our investigators on the process and benefits of data sharing with their colleagues.
In what ways do you feel that caBIG® is a valuable tool to be implemented in response to the changes that are taking place in 21st century research?
21st century biomedical research demands large quantities of clinical data be coupled with high-throughput genomic experimental results, as well as access to substantial numbers of well-annotated biospecimens. These data and specimen demands are often not obtainable at a single institution, and the necessity for research collaboration is greater than in the past. caBIG® provides the path to these collaborations. Rather than working in isolated "silos," investigators will be part of a caBIG® community, with a common vocabulary, interoperable tools, and a dedication to working together.