Pediatric Cancer Data Commons

University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Worldwide, about 300,000 young people are diagnosed with cancer each year. Thanks to decades of medical research, about 80% will survive. A major roadblock to better outcomes for the remaining 20% is the siloed nature of research’s best hope: data. Data from clinical trials are difficult to collect and share across research groups because each group collects data according to their own preferences and definitions. This limits researchers’ ability to analyze patients’ clinical data and to pair it with data from new techniques, like genomic testing, to make discoveries. 

The Pediatric Cancer Data Commons (PCDC) designs better ways to collect and store clinical data (and connect clinical data to other types, such as imaging and genomic data) by developing consensus among researchers to develop a common data language and sharing those standards widely. The PCDC is dedicated to gathering as much data as possible from around the world into a “data commons”—a single place where researchers everywhere can go to access and explore uniform data in pursuit of their research questions.