The National Cancer Institute (NCI) issued a Sources Sought Notice on June 28, 2013 seeking information on the capabilities of qualified sources including small businesses to develop a new model of computational analysis of biological data. This has become a necessity since there is and will continue to be an enormous growth of biomedical data in the future.
NCI wants to create a set of data repositories with co-located computational capacity and an Application Programming Interface (API) to provide security and access to data. The development of a “Cancer Genomics Cloud” will provide better access to NCI generated genomic data.
NCI is considering developing pilots that are envisioned to be a community platform for cancer genome integration and analysis. If the pilots are successful, then NCI will consult with communities and oversight committees to potentially construct production versions of one or more of the pilot clouds based on the results of the pilot evaluations.
The NCI also anticipates that the Cancer Genomics Cloud pilots will serve diverse communities to include application developers, bioinformaticians, computational biologists, molecular biologists, and ultimately clinicians and patients.
For more information, go to www.fbo.gov. All responses need to be sent to Scott Keasey, contracting officer at scott.keasey@nih.gov by or on July 17, 2013. The phone number is 301-846-1115.