Abstract
The pediatric cancer genome is severely under-represented in genomic warehouses as existing data portals have primarily focused on adult malignancies. This is markedly more pronounced for pediatric brain tumor data as large-scale pediatric initiatives like TARGET do not capture these tumors. To address this unmet need, we have developed a new cancer visualization tool (http://pedcbioportal.org). PedcBioPortal is an instance of cBioPortal, supporting pan-cancer integrative analysis of published pediatric cancer data and consortia-based efforts including the Children’s Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium (CBTTC), the Pediatric NeuroOncology Consortium (PNOC), and the St. Baldrick’s Pediatric Stand Up 2 Cancer Dream Team. The aim of PedcBioPortal is to lower the barrier to large-scale pediatric and pan-cancer genomics analysis by providing rich visualizations and detailed statistics/summaries that integrate multi-dimensional datasets. Key functionalities include the ability to view genetic lesions along the genome, correlate genomic and clinical attributes, and obtain study level summary statistics. Importantly, clinical trials data, pharmacological agent information, pathology reports, and tissue images are all incorporated, demonstrating the platform’s ability to house both structured and unstructured data. Additionally, application program interfaces (APIs) supporting bioinformatics/data scientist access for large-scale analytics are available. PedcBioPortal is part of an evolving cloud-based ecosystem of applications dedicated to the empowered use of large-scale pediatric data that flows from biospecimen availability, to the processing of raw data, and finally to interpretation of summarized data. The cBioPortal software is developed and maintained by the cBio Consortium a multi-institutional team (http://www.cbioportal.org).