Australian BioCommons partners with international collaboration focused on personalised treatment for kids with cancer

Industry-leading bioinformatics ecosystem provider, Seven Bridges, sparked international interest this week in the multinational genomic cancer research project that Australian BioCommons contributes to. Their media release Seven Bridges Announces International Collaboration Focused on Personalized Treatment for Kids with Cancer documented how our collaboration will help researchers better understand rare pediatric brain cancer subtypes and improve interventions for patients and their families. Working with Seven Bridges, The Gabriella Miller Kids First Data Resource Center (Kids First DRC), ZERO Childhood Cancer (ZERO), the Children’s Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium (CBTTC) and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), we are establishing internationally federated computational infrastructure that will enable the harmonisation of pediatric cancer data from ZERO Australia with the extensive genomic datasets from CBTTC and Kids First DRC.

So far the team has been working hard on the complex challenge of harmonised analysis of geographically separated and jurisdictionally protected data resources. Cavatica, a cloud-based platform for collaboratively accessing, sharing, and analysing cancer data has been expanded to AWS Sydney. Key members of the team from the Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine (D3b) at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia traveled to Australia earlier this year to boost our local ability to leverage Cavatica's benefits and the story was written up here.

The Australian Government, together with the Minderoo Foundation, recently announced an additional $67 million for personalised treatments for every child with cancer. The investment will directly support the ground breaking Zero Childhood Cancer Personalised Medicine Program (ZERO) that is working to ensure children and young people diagnosed with cancer are given the greatest chance of survival. Expanding the program from approximately 150 children per year to 1,000 children per year all Australian children and young adults diagnosed with cancer will now have access to genomically-guided, precision treatments through this world leading collaborative research and clinical program.

With the expansion of the ZERO Program in Australia and the compelling progress made by the international collaboration towards the seamless sharing of data and analysis methods between researchers in Australia and the United States, we look forward to sharing more exciting updates soon.

Seven Bridges media release