Sylvester launched its Data Portal Informatics Platform in 2021 as part of the cancer center’s commitment to leverage big data’s value in research and patient care.

This novel multi-omics informatics platform facilitates the processing, management, analysis, sharing, and archival of pre-clinical and clinical datasets generated at the cancer center.

“Sylvester’s data portal is being built using state-of-the-art cloud computing approaches to ensure its security for hosting clinical data in a HIPAA-compliant environment, modularity to support the diverse data types generated by the Sylvester Shared Resources and Sylvester labs, and scalability to support the continuous increase in the generation of new data and subsequent data analyses,” said Stephan Schürer, Ph.D., the newly named associate director of data science at Sylvester, who is charged with overseeing the buildout of the cancer center’s data portal.

The Data Portal Informatics Platform facilitates long-term preservation and secure storage of high-value raw and processed data generated, including DNA and RNA sequencing, research histopathology imaging, and mass cytometry data. It provides a unified portal for Sylvester researchers to find and access raw and processed data, using rigorous data standards that ensure interoperability and reusability of that data and automated data processing.

Today’s “data economy” demands that data is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). Making Sylvester’s data FAIR is a primary goal of the cancer center’s data science initiative, which includes this platform, according to Dr. Schürer.