This year, the 8th Annual FedHealthIT Innovation Awards recognized programs from the Department of Veterans Affairs, Military Health, Health and Human Services, and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. These programs were carefully selected by their peers for their commitment to excellence, constant innovation, and producing results. At the event, the National Cancer Institute’s Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) team responsible for the institute’s Proteomic Data Commons (PDC) was honored with an award for their collective body of work. Ratna Thangudu, having attended the event to receive the award for CPTAC, indicated that the “PDC provides the cancer research community with a data service supporting the quality control, integration, storage, and redistribution of standardized cancer proteomic data sets derived from cancer studies.”
21st-century medicine involves the integration of data to address diseases, like cancer, in a comprehensive fashion. NCI established CPTAC to comprehensively analyze the proteins and genes expressed in tumors to understand how cancer starts, progresses, and to help in its diagnoses and treatment. The PDC represents a next-generation interactive proteomics data portal with corresponding genomics and imaging data sets to enable data access, analysis, and sharing as a global public good. It provides the cancer research community with a unified repository and cancer knowledgebase that enables data sharing in support of precision medicine. The PDC is innovative in its mission as well as its functionality; it provides access to highly curated and standardized biospecimen, clinical, and proteomic data all through an intuitive interface to filter, query, search, visualize, and download the data and metadata. Accessed by 54K+ members of the scientific community in more than 130 countries to date the PDC is constantly growing and is a critical resource to proteogenomic researchers studying a variety of disease states worldwide.