OICR’s Genome Informatics team plays key role in development of the Gabriella Miller Kids First Data Resource Portal

Toronto (September 11, 2018) – Today, the Gabriella Miller Kids First Data Resource Center (DRC) at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia launched the Kids First Data Resource Portal, which will advance personalized medicine for the detection, therapy, and management of childhood cancer and structural birth defects. As the Kids First DRC’s chief outward-facing tool, the Kids First Data Resource Portal serves the needs of a diverse group of patients, researchers, and clinicians partnering to create the world’s largest database of pediatric genomic data, and provides the necessary tools and computational resources for their analysis and interpretation.

The portal makes data from approximately 8,000 DNA and RNA samples from children affected with childhood cancer and structural birth defects and their families ready for analysis with a total of 30,000 expected to become available over the next few years for researchers, clinicians and patients through a collaborative, cloud-based environment – giving the research community unprecedented access to pediatric genomic data. The Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) has been a key partner and was responsible for software design and development for the Kids First Data Resource Portal.

“We are very proud of the Kids First Data Resource Portal, as it represents a new model for how open biomedical research databases can operate. Our team looks at this as a ‘third generation’ data portal that builds on the knowledge and experience we gained working on other large databases such as the International Cancer Genome Consortium and the NCI Genomic Data Commons data portals,” says Dr. Vincent Ferretti, Senior Principal Investigator at OICR, and leader of the development of the Kids First Data Resource Portal at OICR. Software created by OICR’s Genome Informatics team, led by Dr. Christina Yung, was built as a collection of open source tools, collectively known as Overture (www.overture.bio), so that their innovations can be shared with the research community to further accelerate other research projects.

The Kids First DRC is led by the Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in partnership with CHOP’s Department of Biomedicine and Health Informatics (DBHi), Children’s National Medical Center, OICR, Center for Data Intensive Science at the University of Chicago, Oregon Health and Science University and Seven Bridges and funded through the NIH Common Fund’s Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Program. The DRC is led by Dr. Adam Resnick, Principal Investigator. Dr. Ferretti recently joined the Research Center of the Sainte-Justine Research Hospital and will continue to lead the Kids First Data Resource Portal development in close collaboration with OICR.

For more information on Kids First DRC visit https://kidsfirstdrc.org/.
To access the Portal directly go to https://portal.kidsfirstdrc.org/.