Release of the Prostate Cancer Atlas, a blueprint towards a holistic view on prostate cancer as a disease
Institute of Oncology Research
Researchers in academia and industry struggle to get access to data sets which help answer their scientific question. The lab of Prof. Theurillat and the co-lead of the bioinformatic facility, Dr. Marco Bolis have taken the challenge to integrate dozens of published RNA sequencing data sets into a compendium for prostate cancer. A web-based tool enables the research community to browse through the data in a customized manner with unprecedented ease.
The Prostate Cancer Atlas is a collaborative effort supported by academic bodies (Bridge Discovery, NRP79), pharmaceutical industry (Orion Pharma, AstraZeneca), and a data science company (Kasvulabs) and has two objectives. First, to merge data sets from different resources into a large interoperable and integrated data set and second to provide the research community with a web-based platform to exploit the data for their own research.
Professor Jean-Philippe Theurillat, could you explain, in a nutshell, why the Prostate Cancer Atlas has the potential to transform Life Science?
"While it has become more common practice that researchers are obliged to provide the raw data supporting their publications, these data sets are typically not standardized and thus cannot talk to each other. This particularly true for RNA sequencing data sets which provide important insights into the active genome in normal and tumor cells. While there is a great potential in facilitating research by merging the different data sets into one integrated atlas, most researchers shy away from tackling this challenge. At the IOR, we overcome these hurdles and harmonized many dozens of data sets with more than thousand samples to provide the first holistic view on prostate cancer as a disease."
What new insights does the Prostate Cancer Atlas provide in comparison to existing knowledge?
"The atlas enables researchers to investigate gradual differences in prostate cancer progression. For this purpose, we have teamed up with collaboration partners in academia (e.g., Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics) and industry to generate a scalable, cloud-based tool for the entire research community across the globe. The tool not only allows the researchers to analyze the data but also enables them to their data culled from experiments or clinical patients into perspective with the atlas reference cohort."
What specific innovations in medicine do you hope to achieve through this project?
"The Prostate Cancer Atlas will facilitate investigations into drug targets, their expression in various patient cohorts and thereby help better estimate which patients may benefit. Moreover, data sets with annotated drug response will help develop biomarker which can help clinicians in guiding the best treatment option for a given patient."
The Prostate Cancer Atlas is available at https://www.prostatecanceratlas.org/home
