NCI Cancer Data Aggregator (CDA) Awarded to Consortium

Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research (FNLCR) awarded a contract to develop the National Cancer Institute's (NCI's) Cancer Data Aggregator (CDA) to a consortium led by the Broad Institute, Institute for Systems Biology, Seven Bridges Genomics, and General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), Inc. The CDA is a query engine that will help researchers to find, sort, and pull together data from across the NCI Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC), NCI Data Coordinating Centers (DCC), and other repositories.

The CDA will help NCI overcome a significant obstacle in integrating different data sets. Just as a web search engine can pool results from a wide variety of websites, the CDA will allow researchers to query across different data repositories using a common data model. Linking multiple data types and data sets will allow researchers to increase the power of that data, ultimately leading to new and better ways of diagnosing, preventing, and treating cancer and aiding in scientific discovery. The CDA is expected to launch in 2021.