On Aug. 15, 2017, the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Program awarded a $15 million grant to establish the Kids First Data Resource Center. The five-year award allowed scientists to harness genomic data from thousands of pediatric patients to collaboratively engage in shared research.

Adam Margolin, Ph.D., professor of biomedical engineering, and director of computational biology in the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) School of Medicine and the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute was co-principal investigator on the project.

OHSU will collaborate with investigators from the Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine (D3b) at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, biomedical data analysis firm Seven Bridges, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, the University of Chicago, and Children’s National Health System.

The Data Resource Center will provide new analytic tools and access to the largest cross-disease collection of annotated clinical and genomic sequence data from children with cancer and structural birth defect and their families. At the inception of the project, the team will immediately work to make available genomic sequencing data, and associated tools, from 6,000 pediatric patient samples.

By enabling researchers to find and perform large-scale analyses across pediatric cohorts, the DRC will act as a centralized hub from which researchers and clinicians can access phenotypic and genetic sequence data for novel research. Other shared data resources exist in pockets across the country, but the DRC is the largest culling of that information in one resource, according to Margolin.