In February 2019, the precisionFDA and the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) (in coordination with DREAM Challenges) proudly announced the best performers in the first-ever Crowdsourced Multi-omics Sample Mislabeling Big Data Challenge.

It is no coincidence that one cellular process is mentioned time and time again in discussions of cell-signaling pathways in cancer - that is phosphorylation. Since its discovery, it has come to be recognized as a global regulator of many intracellular processes such as growth, proliferation, and cell division.

In biomedical research, sample mislabeling, or incorrect annotation has been a long-standing problem that contributes to irreproducible results and invalid conclusions. These problems are particularly prevalent in large scale multi-omics studies where human errors could arise during sample transferring, sample tracking, large-scale data generation, and data sharing/management.

University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center researchers Arul Chinnaiyan, Alexey Nesvizhskii and colleagues have recently teamed up to catalog circular RNA (circRNA) in multiple cancers and conducted initial research that suggests these stable structures could serve as cancer markers in blood or urine.

Integrative proteogenomic methods use mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomic database for identifying new genomic alterations and validating novel protein sequences as potential disease biomarkers or therapeutic targets. The customized database approach is time consuming and not feasible for real-time web applications.

Built on a continuous partnership between National Cancer Institute’s (NCI’s) Cancer Imaging Program and the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC), NCI’s The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) releases a newly improved CPTAC histopathology interface. The interface hosts histopathology imaging generated by CPTAC, with matched radiology imaging in TCIA. Significant performance improvements have been made to the platform in response to feedback from the community, providing enhanced functionalities to query pathology report details, download, share and view slide images from approved CPTAC cases.

Built on a continuous partnership between National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the University of Victoria Genome British Columbia Proteomics Centre, NCI’s CPTAC Assay Portal releases 660 mouse multiple reaction monitoring-mass spectrometry (MRM-MS) plasma assays to the community.

The incidence of early-onset gastric cancer (EOGC), a type of cancer that occurs in younger patients and found throughout the stomach, is markedly elevated in the Republic of Korea. As a country with the highest rates worldwide in both sexes, there is a need to identify molecular signatures that can be used to diagnose and treat EOGC.

Claudin-Low (CLOW) tumors are classified as a subset of triple-negative breast cancers and account for a minority of breast cancer cases. But until now, there has been little study of their unique biological features. Understanding the biology of CLOW tumors is important for designing targeted therapeutic agents to treat highly aggressive breast cancers.

The NCI-CPTAC Multi-omics Enabled Sample Mislabeling Correction Challenge sub-challenge 2 closes on December 19 at 07:59:59 UTC. Just four days left to submit your computational algorithms. Remember, if you did not participate in sub-challenge 1, you can still participate in sub-challenge 2. Thank you for your participation and please continue to post any questions or concerns on the discussion forum.