Director's Note
In a town hall meeting held shortly after he was sworn in as the new Director of the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Harold Varmus observed that there has never been a better time for cancer research, noting that a "portrait of cancer" was beginning to emerge "partly due to genomics, partly due to health information technology, and partly due to deep understanding of biochemistry and cell biology." He went on to describe the tremendous opportunities for cancer research that face us, as genetic information provides new ways to think about how therapies are developed and diseases such as cancer may be diagnosed and treated.
The evidence to support Dr. Varmus's observations is all around us. For the first time, the availability of both large, publicly accessible data sets and sophisticated tools to access and analyze data are enabling researchers to conduct in silico research on a large scale. caBIG®—its infrastructure, grid, tools, vocabularies, and myriad of other capabilities—is serving as both an enabler and a catalyst for this revolutionary era of discovery. In this issue alone we hear how in silico validation of new hypotheses is speeding the identification of new drug targets at Georgetown University; how automated imaging analysis is enabling pathologists at Emory University to analyze vast numbers of samples to inform scientific understanding of the how's and why's of brain tumor progression; and how a massive data-mart will enable comparative effectiveness research at Moffitt Cancer Center. We also highlight four new peer-reviewed publications that discuss new informatics tools to support efforts of individual investigators at the bench.
But connectivity is just one aspect of caBIG®. Equally important to sustaining this pace of discovery is a community of individuals and institutions who are committed to developing and using the capabilities that enable such research. I'm proud to say that next month will mark the sixth time that caBIG® will convene as a community—at the 2010 Annual Meeting—and I invite you to join us there.
Ken Buetow, Ph.D.
August 1, 2010
