UW Cancer Omics Discovery Bank

This project creates the UW Cancer Omics Discovery Bank (ODB). The ODB will provide a seamless structure linking genomic, proteomic and metabolomic data (“Omics”) with clinical data and banked biospecimens. The ODB will provide UW researchers access to searchable, annotated data on cancer patients who receive care at the UW Carbone Cancer Center.

The project will generate the informatics and regulatory infrastructure to share and stimulate sophisticated omics (i.e., genomics, proteomics and metabolomics) analyses for diverse projects. By igniting translational omics research, the ODB will create multiple opportunities for investigators to use human data as a unique resource for making discoveries and for translating their work to the clinic. The ODB will overcome major barriers to human translational genomics research at UW by facilitating data sharing, searching, and access to clinical information, while maintaining human subjects protections.

New Omics technologies are being rapidly implemented in cancer to understand cancer biology and to select precision medicines. Among these, next-generation sequencing (NGS) of cancer genomes is becoming routine in clinical practice. In addition, various research projects generate omics data from cancer patients, but often the data are siloed by regulatory barriers and are not sharable or linked to biospecimens.