A survey of European cancer researchers undertaken by the European Association for Cancer Research shows a widespread lack of use of caBIG research orientated tools in Europe.

The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) was launched in 2003 by the US National Cancer Institute with the aim of connecting research teams through the use of shared infrastructure and software to collect, analyse and share data.

The intention was to overcome the “silo-like” nature of research where individual labs and institutes worked in isolation, each collecting and interpreting data using a unique language of their own.

Although CaBIG is primarily a US-based endeavour the European Association for Cancer Research conducted an online survey in January 2011, funded through FP7, to identify the penetration of the caBIG project into European laboratories.

Altogether the survey was sent to 6396 researchers based in Europe, with 764 respondents, giving a total response rate of 11.94%. Participants were given a list of 32 caBIG branded tools and asked whether they used each one “often”, “sometimes” or “never”. If they used the tool respondents were asked to rate it out of 5, with 1 being very poor, and 5 being very good and to suggest improvements that could be made.

The results showed that gene pattern, despite being the most frequently used tool was only used often by 2.01% of respondents, and was never used by 84.81%. It was followed by national biomedical imaging archive that was “used often” by 1.86% of respondents, biomed GT wiki and Lexica used often by 1.66%, cancer genome wide associations scan used often by 1.46% and ca Array data management systems used often by 1.31%.

Though the results showed that the tools in the questionnaire were little used by survey respondents, they did show a high level of regard from those who do use them. “While the NCI’s plan to introduce the caBIG network and tools in the US involved promoting, supporting and subsidising their introduction at NCI-funded institutes, European institutes and scientists received no such promotion and so the array of tools offered under the caBIG umbrella appears to have gone largely unnoticed,” write the authors.

They add that bioinformatic developments need better dissemination and marketing to the cancer research community. Commenting on the paper Finlay MacDougall, from the UK National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI), said, “The survey raises concerns over the level of awareness European biomedical researchers have of the availability of these tools and thus over the potential for duplication of development effort as European institutes may be expending resources in the creation of platforms and software which are already freely available and tested in the American research community.” He added investigators already using the tools need to relay their positive experiences to the cancer and biomedical research community. “Some of the work being done using these platforms is really exciting and needs to be promoted in Europe in order that we can expand the potential for straightforward data sharing and data integration to the benefit of research,” he said.


Source: Warden R 2011 Impact of caBIG on the European cancer community ecancermedicalscience 5 225

DOI: 10.3332/ecancer.2011.225