Associate Professor Levi Waldron awarded cancer genomics grant subcontract

Levi Waldron was awarded a subcontract from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s cBioPortal for Cancer Genomics grant, also in collaboration with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Waldron’s team will create a new software package to provide streamlined, analyst-friendly access to hundreds of multiomic datasets and tens of thousands of cancer patients in the cBioPortal database. The package will leverage “MultiAssayExperiment,” a data structure developed within the lab to simplify the representation and analysis of heterogeneous assays that is relied on by more than 15 other software packages within the Bioconductor project for open-source bioinformatics.

This advancement will enable analysts to select datasets based on cancer type, desired assay, clinical or pathological data, or genomic feature, and efficiently apply analyses provided by the Bioconductor project.

“I’m excited about this project because it will provide Bioconductor’s more than 1,200 developers and 685,000 annual website visitors with easy access to a breadth of cancer data that is unprecedented for the Bioconductor project,” says Waldron. “It also deepens our collaboration with outstanding colleagues at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who have developed the most widely used database of its kind for cancer genomics.”cBioPortal is funded by the Informatics Technology for Cancer Research program of The National Cancer Institute.