Open access to large cancer datasets is critical to clinical advances

A major challenge facing cancer researchers is the identification and treatment of drug resistant cancers. In a new guest editorial published in PLOS Medicine Andrew Beck, from Harvard Medical School, Boston, argues for enabling the sharing of Omics and clinical data among a large community of cancer researchers and data scientists in order to maximize the translation of research into better individual patient outcomes.

Cancer is a heterogeneous disease across patients as well as a heterogeneous disease within individual patients. Different regions of a tumor often have different molecular features at the genetic and protein levels, and this intra-tumoral molecular heterogeneity is thought to cause drug resistance and treatment failure in cancer. The editorial reflects on two research articles recently published in PLOS Medicine focused on cancer heterogeneity. One study by James Brenton and colleagues demonstrated that treatment resistance in high-grade, serous ovarian cancer can be predicted using a newly developed algorithm that measures intra-tumoral genetic heterogeneity. In a separate paper, James Rocco and colleagues analyzed publicly available, whole-exome sequencing data from The Cancer Genome Atlas to show that a simple quantitative measure of intra-tumoral heterogeneity (mutant-allele tumor heterogeneity) is associated with prognosis in Head and Neck Cancer.

Both of these new methods for measuring intra-tumoral heterogeneity require further testing and validation before they can be utilized in the clinic. However, Dr Beck notes, "[t]he continuing generation of high-quality, open-access Omics data sets from large populations of cancer patients will be critically important to enable the development of computational methods to translate knowledge of cancer heterogeneity into new diagnostics and improved clinical outcomes...."

Dr Beck concludes, "[e]nsuring open access to high quality datasets will ensure that the largest possible community of researchers is able to address the most important problems in cancer medicine today."