ZERO Childhood Cancer Data Portal launched

Researchers can now access a large bank of paediatric genomic data collected as part of the ZERO Childhood Cancer program, including molecular, phenotypic, multi-omics, and clinical data, plus physical biospecimens across 38 diseases. Housed within the newly launched ZERO Childhood Cancer Data Portal, the datasets represent tumour samples from 1,019 participants in the ZERO2 clinical trial, which includes all children with cancer in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand.

The Human Genome Informatics team at the Australian BioCommons was thrilled to recently partner with the Children’s Cancer Institute (CCI) and the ZERO program to support their efforts in establishing the data portal, which formed part of a national, multi-institutional project called the Human Genomes Platform Project (HGPP). The HGPP was designed to enhance capability for securely and responsibly sharing human genome research data nationally and internationally, ensuring maximum value can be derived from these assets. Along with CCI and ZERO, HGPP was a successful partnership between Australian Access Federation, Australian BioCommons, Australian Genomics, Garvan Institute of Medical Research, National Computational Infrastructure, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, and University of Melbourne Centre for Cancer Research. 

The HGPP team adapted GA4GH’s Beacon network for implementation in Australia, with Beacon v2 now supporting the ZERO Childhood Cancer Data Portal. To learn more about key outcomes and outputs of the HGPP, watch the final showcase on the BioCommons YouTube channel.

The development of the ZERO Childhood Cancer Data Portal was supported by the Australian BioCommons' Human Genomes Platform Project and funded through NCRIS investments from Bioplatforms Australia and the Australian Research Data Commons, and investment by the ZERO Childhood Cancer Program and Children's Cancer Institute.