Abstract 6475: Leveraging real-world pancreatic cancer datasets to drive drug discovery and patient health
Authors: Abdilleh Kawther , Worman Zelia , Beck Rowan , Fisher Cera , Sain Divya , DiGiovanna Jack , Matrisian Lynn , Doss Sudheer , Davis-Dusenbery Brandi 
Published: March 2024

Pancreatic cancer is the third leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States. Current therapeutic options offer a dismal overall survival with the 5-year survival at just ~12%. Analysis of the clinical and molecular underpinnings of pancreatic cancer is critical to developing both early detection methodologies as well as novel therapeutic options. The aggressiveness and deadly nature of this disease warranted the development of a data repository and analysis system dedicated to pancreatic cancer data. The Pancreatic Cancer Action Network’s (PanCAN) SPARK platform is a cloud-based data and analytics platform, powered by Velsera, that integrates real-world patient health data from PanCAN research initiatives and accelerates research by making pancreatic cancer data easier to access and use. Encompassing clinical, imaging, and genomics data from over 600 patients with pancreatic cancer within PanCAN’s Know Your Tumor ® (KYT) precision medicine service, the SPARK platform connects with petabytes of publicly available cancer data via the Cancer Genomics Cloud (CGC), also powered by Velsera. The CGC is part of NCI’s Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC), a cloud-based data science infrastructure that connects data with analytics tools to allow researchers to share, integrate, analyze, visualize, and drive scientific discovery.

Here, we demonstrate the application of these datasets by providing a case study demonstrating how to combine and enrich data to accelerate pancreatic cancer research. Currently, the genomic and proteomic data available on CRDC amounts to 402 and 304 cases of pancreatic tumor samples, respectively. We will use the capabilities of the SPARK and CGC platforms, which provide ready-to-use tools for multi-omics analysis that require no coding knowledge. Using the KYT and CRDC open-access pancreatic cancer data, we aim to demonstrate how to perform integrated analysis of data from diverse scientific domains, and share with collaborators all in one space, streamlining and increasing the potential for new scientific discoveries.

Further expansion of the PanCAN and CGC datasets will undoubtedly provide a more comprehensive understanding of pancreatic cancer tumor biology. SPARK and CGC’s cloud based computation infrastructure, along with numerous available cancer datasets and easy-to-use multi-omics data processing workflows and data analytic tools will be instrumental in this process.

Citation Format: Kawther Abdilleh, Zelia Worman, Rowan Beck, Cera Fisher, Divya Sain, Jack DiGiovanna, Lynn Matrisian, Sudheer Doss, Brandi Davis-Dusenbery. Leveraging real-world pancreatic cancer datasets to drive drug discovery and patient health [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2024; Part 1 (Regular Abstracts); 2024 Apr 5-10; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(6_Suppl):Abstract nr 6475.