Project Background
City of Hope is a comprehensive cancer care center gathering a wide range of clinical, genomic, and specimen data about patients undergoing treatment using the Total Cancer Care protocol. Working within the Oncology Research Information Exchange Network (ORIEN) consortium, the goal of this project is to bring together clinical and genomic data, making it available across the entire City of Hope enterprise where it can be used to improve precision-based therapies for future patients.
LabKey Server acts as the hub for integrating a multitude of data types, presenting it for further research and analysis. LabKey brings data together for holistic analysis of all the information available for a given patient or type of patient.
Precision medicine involves aligning many complex elements, including deidentified patient data, whole genome or exome sequences, specific tumor sequences, specimen records from dozens of blood draws, biopsies, and more. LabKey Server acts as the hub for integrating a multitude of data types, presenting it for further research and analysis. LabKey brings data together for holistic analysis of all the information available for a given patient or type of patient. Many comparisons are made to improve health outcomes and expand knowledge: pathological to non-pathological tissue in a patient, samples between patients with the same health conditions, patients with pathologies to healthy patients. Insights can be drawn, treatments evaluated, and patient care made more certain and successful.
Challenge
Gathering and integrating data from multiple locations can be difficult, particularly when protected patient data is involved and security is critical. The institution/enterprise needed to provide authorized users with access to diverse data from a wide variety of sources without resorting to piles of spreadsheets and manual alignment or home-built solutions. Researchers also needed to be able to generate visualizations and reports directly within the user interface to unlock trends and insights without leaving the combined data landscape.
Why Labkey
City of Hope determined that LabKey Server would integrate well with their existing data warehouse systems, provide users with graphical access to querying and reporting, as well as API access for developers and users performing more advanced analysis techniques. Additionally, LabKey Server is well suited to address the challenge of extracting historical information from a wealth of existing patient treatment records that were not originally stored in ways that align with other data.
More than just a software vendor, LabKey also supports City of Hope’s needs for team collaboration solutions, API development, and workflow integration, with an audit system that supports regulatory compliance. Looking ahead, LabKey solutions offer the expansion and flexibility required for scaling the City of Hope and ORIEN networks into broader use.