“The National Cancer Institute is looking to the cloud as a critical part of its modernized IT infrastructure and to help cancer researchers have greater access to data.”
“The cloud is a “giant enabler” of NCI’s infrastructural ability to support cancer researchers’ ability to both access and share datasets and information about cancer, NCI CIO Jeff Shilling said during GovernmentCIO Media & Research’s Cloud Summit Wednesday.”
“With NCI’s legacy infrastructure, cancer researchers had to go to cancer centers that housed data and do their compute there. Shilling said this process was slow and cumbersome. But with the cloud, NCI can provide standardized datasets that researchers can use as a reference model to compare their data to more easily.”
“’With the cloud, the idea of bringing your data to where the actual reference datasets are and having compute there to do your analysis right there gives you answers very, very quickly, and we don’t have to move these giant reference datasets around,’ Shilling said.”
“NCI is also migrating its internal infrastructure to the cloud to help its own researchers and staff advance their work. Shilling said that software-as-a-service tools have been helpful in a variety of areas, from the simple needs that Microsoft 360 brings to advanced applications for genomic analysis.”
“Between the technological changes that NCI has provided for its own personnel and the cancer research community it supports, Shilling highlighted the strides that the country has made in understanding cancer with the powerful computational capabilities that NCI has developed with infrastructure modernization. NCI, for instance, has come to understand that cancer encompasses over 1,000 diseases, each with different genetic mutations that arise from the environment, genetic inheritance and more.”
“Ultimately, modernized IT infrastructure has accelerated these findings because it enables researchers to share information, findings and data…” Read the full article here.
Source: How NCI’s Cloud Adoption is Advancing Cancer Research – By Melissa Harris, October 6, 2021. GovernmentCIO.
