The NIH Common Fund’s “Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Program” (Kids First) https://commonfund.nih.gov/kidsfirst/overview is being co-led by four NIH Institutes with a working group of program officers from nine other NIH Institutes and Centers all working together to help to guide the program’s research efforts.
(Kids First) program is going to study advances in genetics research by developing a large-scale data resource. Analyzing data from different disease types is crucial to the biological understanding and precision treatment of pediatric diseases since children born with birth defects are at a higher risk of developing childhood cancers.
(Kids First) will enable researchers to have access to vast amounts of childhood cancer and structural birth defects genetics data that will accelerate their research. Contingent on available funds, a recent award to the “Kids First” program is expected to provide funding for five years of up to a total of about $14.8 million.
Last July, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) https://chop.edu was selected to create the (Kids First) Data Resource Center (DRC), a cloud-based repository of genomic and clinical information. “Kids First” will have the computational infrastructure and use tools needed to analyze large scale data sets. Data will be included from more than 25,000 samples from patients and family members by the end of 2018.
Specifically, CHOP team’s researchers are at the following institutions:
- The Ontario Institute for Cancer Research https://olcr.on.ca will design and develop the Kids First Data Resource Portal (DRP) and associated web-based analytic tools for disease specific data sets.
- University of Chicago https://bioloicalsciences.uchicao.edu, will work with others on management and the optimization of large-scale genomic data processing for the initiative to support the establishment of cloud-based open source software
- Children’s National Health System https://childrensnational.org will support specific efforts for the administrative and outreach core and will coordinate additional foundation and consortia-based partnerships for the generation of new, large-scale pediatric cancer, and birth defects data
- Oregon Health and Science University www.ohsu.edu/xd will provide resources and new technologies to support community standards and frameworks for reproducible genomic analysis
- Seven Bridges https://www.sevenbridges.com will develop the scalable cloud-based data analysis platform using the infrastructure the company co-developed and deployed with CHOP referred to as the CAVATICA platform