Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) was founded in 1855 as the first hospital in the United States dedicated to the healthcare of children. It has a tradition of research that has spanned nearly a century. The research breakthroughs at CHOP have improved the lives of countless children throughout the world.
A new scientific center at CHOP aims to harness and broadly share biomedical information to more quickly benefit patients. The Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine (D3b) has the goal of advancing precision medicine—helping to match the most appropriate treatment to individual patients.
Under its open-science model, the Center will drive the secure generation and integration of complex genomic and clinical patient data, and develop the open-access platforms that support collaborative discovery. Researchers world-wide will be able to access this information and work together to fully share novel ideas and approaches for new biological targets for precise, less-toxic clinical treatments for children.
One of the Center’s first major initiatives is the launch of its open-access pediatric genomic data cloud, Cavatica, announced in October 2016 as a private commitment in conjunction with the national Cancer Moonshot. Cavatica gives clinicians and scientists secure access to big data about pediatric diseases that is empowered for secure, collaborative analysis through scalable cloud computing — meaning that the users of the service do not need to bring their own high-powered computers in order to perform complex analyses of vast quantities of data.
“Cavatica gives us an unprecedented opportunity to research a number of childhood diseases, ranging from pediatric brain tumors that are the leading cause of disease-related death in children to rare pediatric disorders that get limited attention and resources,” said Adam Resnick, Ph.D., an expert in brain tumors and Director of the Center for Data-Driven Discovery in Biomedicine at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Another program at CHOP, The Children’s Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium (CBTTC) is one of the largest pediatric brain tumor biorepositories in the world, depositing its genomics data for shared access and discovery across the entire scientific community. This data is also available pre-publication and is shared without embargo via the Cavatica platform.
DataCite is incredibly excited to have Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia join the DataCite community.
