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Pediatric central nervous system (CNS) cancers are the leading disease-related cause of death in children and there is urgent need for curative therapeutic strategies for these tumors. To address the urgency, Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN) has advanced an open science model to accelerate the research discovery for pediatric brain tumors. In first phase of Open Pediatric Brain Tumor Atlas (OpenPBTA) effort CBTN together with Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium (PNOC) with support of Gabriella Miller Kids First Data Resource Center (KFDRC) created and comprehensively characterized over 1000 clinically annotated pediatric brain tumors. In the second phase of the OpenPBTA effort, through resource awards and collaboration across KFDRC, the NCI Childhood Cancer Data Initiative (CCDI), NCI’s Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC), NCI Center for Cancer Research and additional partnered institutions and foundations, CBTN has expanded OpenPBTA to support high throughput molecular characterization for an additional 1900 pediatric brain tumor patients and their families. This includes the processing and characterization of over 8000 specimens across >50 brain tumor diagnoses. The cohort expansion builds on >1000 previously characterized samples with a portfolio of multimodal data including whole genome sequencing, RNA sequencing, miRNA sequencing, methylation sequencing, proteomics, lipidomics and/or metabolomics. Molecular data is linked to patient longitudinal clinical data, imaging data (MRIs and radiology reports), histology slide images, and pathology reports. To inform novel discovery and clinical implementation of genomic approaches for diagnostic/therapeutic purposes, the data is deposited the cloud-based research environment of the NCI’s CCDI and the KFDRC to provide near real-time integration, dissemination, processing, and sharing of associated petabyte-scale harmonized data. The approach leverages the DRC platform’s cloud-based computational environment in CAVATICA. Processed annotations are facilitated via CAVATICA-enabled shareable pipelines and can be explored through PedcBioPortal, a data visualization/analysis application further integrating additional public and deposited datasets. This expansion phase of OpenPBTA is released with no embargo period and provides one of the largest deeply characterized cohorts of pediatric brain tumor samples and associated clinical data for >3000 pediatric brain tumor patients. CBTN’s open-science, rapid-release model aims to advance novel biomarkers and therapeutic exploratory research, supporting new clinical trial development and accelerated discovery on behalf of changing the outcome for kids with brain tumors. Citation Format: Mateusz P. Koptyra, Komal Rahti, Yuankun Zhu, Bailey Farrow, Daniel Miller, Adam Kraya, Yiran Guo, Peter Madsen, Nicholas Van Kuren, Xiaoyan Huang, Miguel A. Brown, Jennifer L. Mason, Meen Chul Kim, Allison P. Heath, Brian M. Ennis, Bo Zhang, Jena V. Lilly, Jo Lynne Rokita, Christopher Friedman, Ximena P. Cuellar, Catherine A. Sullivan, Noel Coleman, Trang Duros, Thinh Q. Nguyen, Emmett C. Drake, Zeinab Helili, Beth A. Frenkel, Gerri R. Trooskin, Ariana Familiar, Karthik Viswanathan, Christopher M. Beck, Madison L. Hollawell, Valerie P. Baubet, Cassie Kline, Mariarita Santi, Tatiana S. Patton, Stephanie Stefankiewicz, Arya Kamnaa, Ryan A. Velasco, Dani Cardona, Phillip J. Storm, Adam C. Resnick, o/b/o Children's Brain Tumor Network. Expansion of the Pediatric Brain Tumor Atlas: Children's Brain Tumor Network, Kids First Data Resource and Childhood Cancer Data Initiative Open Science effort. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2023; Part 1 (Regular and Invited Abstracts); 2023 Apr 14-19; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(7_Suppl):Abstract nr 3566.

Twelve evidence-based profiles of roles across the translational workforce and two patients were made available through clinical and translational science (CTS) Personas, a project of the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program National Center for Data to Health (CD2H). The persona profiles were designed and researched to demonstrate the key responsibilities, motivators, goals, software use, pain points, and professional development needs of those working across the spectrum of translation, from basic science to clinical research to public health. The project’s goal was to provide reliable documents that could be used to inform CTSA software development projects, educational resources, and communication initiatives. This paper presents the initiative to create personas for the translational workforce, including the methodology, engagement strategy, and lessons learned. Challenges faced and successes achieved by the project may serve as a roadmap for others searching for best practices in the creation of Persona profiles.

The Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Program (Kids First) aims at facilitating researchers to uncover new insights into the biology of childhood cancer (CC) and structural birth defects (SBD). Kids First has two initiatives, i) whole genome sequencing of biospecimens from families with CC/SBD, and ii) establishing Kids First Data Resources. Kids First Data Resource Center developed the Kids First Data Resource Portal (KFDRP), a centralized platform to search, view, analyze, and identify currently accessible data from both Kids First and collaborative cohorts, incorporating omics and phenotypic information of 30 studies and 26,300 participants. A recently released KFDRP component is Variant WorkBench (VWB), enabling users to query, mangle, analyze and visualize genomic variants from participating cohorts, with the Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN) being one of the cohorts. VWB supports programming languages such as Python, Spark, SQL and R for in-depth analysis in Apache Zeppelin notebooks. In addition to variant calls and phenotypic information, VWB hosts rich external variant annotations in the public domain, such as Cancer Hotspots, COSMIC and ClinVar. Users can also load additional databases (e.g. Human Gene Mutation Database/HGMD) within a notebook, import custom datasets as temporary query tables, export analysis outputs to local drives, visualize analysis results in multiple chart styles, display local figures, and save notebooks for sharing, further use and Cavatica projects. In an effort to screen tier 1 genes (n=578) from the most recent Cancer Gene Census provided by COSMIC in CBTN, we identified ~127,500 germline variants that are both rare and damaging, or that are already cataloged in the most recent version of ClinVar/HGMD. The whole process took less than one hour which is much faster than conventional methods. VWB enables efficient genomic variant analysis and discoveries in pediatric neuro-oncology research with advanced big data technology.

Academic health centers, CTSA hubs, and hospital libraries experience similar funding challenges and charges to do more with less. In recent years academic health center and hospital librarians have risen to these challenges by examining their service models, and beyond that, examining their patron base and users' needs. To meet the needs of employees, patients, and those who assist patients, hospital librarians can employ the CTS Personas, a project of the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program National Center for Data to Health. The Persona profiles, which outline the motivations, goals, pain points, wants, and needs of twelve employees and two patients in translational science, provide vital information and insights that can inform everything from designing software tools and educational services, to advertising these services, to designing impactful and collaborative library spaces.

Pediatric brain tumors comprise a heterogeneous molecular and histological landscape that challenges most current precision-medicine approaches. While recent large-scale efforts to molecularly characterize distinct histological entities have dramatically advanced the field’s capacity to classify and further define molecular subtypes, developing therapeutic and less toxic molecularly-defined clinical approaches remains a challenge. To define new approaches to meet these challenges and advance scalable, shared biospecimen- and data-resources for pediatric brain tumors, the Children’s Brain Tumor Network and Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium, in partnership with the Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation Childhood Cancer Data Lab, launched OpenPBTA, a global open science Pediatric Brain Tumor Atlas initiative to comprehensively define the molecular landscape of pediatric brain tumors. The initiative contains multi-modal analyses of research- and clinical-trial based DNA and RNA sequences from nearly 1,000 subjects (with 1,256 tumors) along with their longitudinal clinical data. The OpenPBTA’s open science framework for analysis tests the capacity of crowd-sourced collaborative architectures to advance more rapid, iterative and integrated discovery of the underlying mechanisms of disease across pediatric brain and spinal cord tumors. Since the launch of the project, OpenPBTA has collaboratively created reproducible workflows for integrated consensus SNV, CNV, and fusion calling, enabled RNA-Seq-based classification of medulloblastoma subtypes, and more than 25 additional DNA- and RNA-based analyses. The open-science platform and associated datasets and processed results provide a continuously updated, global view of the integrated cross-disease molecular landscape of pediatric brain tumors. Such biospecimen- and clinically-linked scalable data resources provide unprecedented collaborative opportunities for precision-based, personalized therapeutic discovery and drug development with the upcoming further integration of proteomic sample data (N >300) and drug response datasets, additionally diversifying the multimodal discovery potential of crowd-sourced approaches for accelerated impact for children with brain tumors.

The Pediatric Brain Tumor Atlas (PBTA), created as a multi-center effort by the Children’s Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium (CBTTC) and Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium (PNOC) and supported by the Gabriella Miller Kids First Data Resource Center (DRC), has the initial goal of comprehensively characterizing over 1,600 clinically annotated pediatric brain tumor samples and making the data publicly available to cancer researchers worldwide in near real time and without embargo. PBTA comprises comprehensive clinical data in addition to whole exome sequencing, whole genome sequencing (WGS), RNA sequencing (RNASeq), miRNA sequencing, and proteomics. To address the need to inform novel discovery and clinical implementation of genomic approaches for diagnostic/therapeutic purposes, PBTA utilizes the cloud-based research environment of the Gabriella Miller Kids First DRC to provide near real-time integration, dissemination, processing, and sharing of associated petabyte-scale harmonized data. The PBTA initiative leverages the DRC platform’s users to access their dbGAP approved use of TARGET and other pediatric cancer datasets hosted by NCI’s Cancer Genomics’ Cloud and Genomic Data Commons, allowing for cross-disease studies. Processed annotations is further enabled for the PBTA via PedcBioPortal, a data visualization/analysis application further integrating additional public and deposited datasets. In its first data release are over 30 different types of pediatric brain tumors representing over 1,000 subjects. This data is available on the Kids First DRC Portal and PedcBioPortal and users can seamlessly move between applications. Data types include those for matched tumor/normal samples, such as WGS, RNASeq, proteomics, longitudinal clinical data, imaging data (MRIs and radiology reports), histology slide images, and pathology reports. CBTTC/PNOC promote real-time data release and collaborative discovery via shared resources. The combination of cloud-based analytic platforms with data from both genomics and clinical practice serves to define a new paradigm for accelerated pediatric cancer translational research.

Since launching to the public in September 2018, the Gabriella Miller Kids First Data Resource Center (DRC) has made an increasing number of pediatric genomic studies available to the research community. Currently, 1.3 PBs of genomic and clinical data drawn from 12,000 participants are available across a variety of pediatric cancer and structural birth defect studies. The DRC has architected a secure, cloud-based platform with over 1,300 users that supports the ability of researchers to not only find, access, and reuse data, but also integrate, collaborate, and analyze data quickly at scale. Users can use integrations with platforms such as Cavatica for bioinformatics workflows and PedcBioPortal for cancer genomic visualizations. Additionally, a set of framework services, powered by Gen3, provide a foundation for interoperability with other large-scale data sources, platforms, and a growing ecosystem of analysis and visualization applications. These integrations allow users to search across both TARGET and Kids First clinical data in one location while allowing data governance to be maintained by the original approvers. The new “explore data” feature allows users to search across all studies in order to identify virtual cohorts. Within the portal, these cohorts can be saved and shared with collaborators for iterative refinement and analysis. With appropriate approvals, the associated genomic data can be accessed and analyzed seamlessly in Cavatica or other platforms with interoperable framework services. Additionally, gene searching capabilities will be available in 2020. Data is free to download and cloud credits are available for analysis support.

We report a comprehensive proteogenomics analysis, including whole-genome sequencing, RNA sequencing, and proteomics and phosphoproteomics profiling, of 218 tumors across 7 histological types of childhood brain cancer: low-grade glioma (n = 93), ependymoma (32), high-grade glioma (25), medulloblastoma (22), ganglioglioma (18), craniopharyngioma (16), and atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumor (12). Proteomics data identify common biological themes that span histological boundaries, suggesting that treatments used for one histological type may be applied effectively to other tumors sharing similar proteomics features. Immune landscape characterization reveals diverse tumor microenvironments across and within diagnoses. Proteomics data further reveal functional effects of somatic mutations and copy number variations (CNVs) not evident in transcriptomics data. Kinase-substrate association and co-expression network analysis identify important biological mechanisms of tumorigenesis. This is the first large-scale proteogenomics analysis across traditional histological boundaries to uncover foundational pediatric brain tumor biology and inform rational treatment selection.

Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Program (GMKF) is a nation-wide, multi-year initiative focused on the integration of large-scale clinically annotated genomic data for childhood cancers and structural birth defects supported by the NIH Common Fund. Awarded by GMKF, the Kids First Data Resource Center (DRC) is tasked to build infrastructure and workflows for data intaking, harmonization, integration and access authorization to empower collaborative discoveries across the GMKF and other integrated datasets. A key challenge for uniform analyses and empowered discovery of large-scale genomic data relates to the diverse genomic processing workflows and methods employed across the sequencing and bioinformatics community. The DRC genomic harmonization team aims to provide “analysis ready” datasets that are “functionally equivalent” across the Kids First datasets and other large-scale genomic data initiatives in order to accelerate the discovery process. Paired with the cloud-based workspace environments of the DRC, such harmonized dataset provide unprecedented opportunities for shared, reproducible discovery by a diverse, collaborative network of researchers. As such, DRC initial pipelines are developed with BWA-MEM alignment on genome build GRCh38 followed by the GATK best practices for germline variant calling and joint genotyping. Common Workflow Language (CWL) is used as the main workflow specification, while Docker technology has been applied to containerize all the tools used by the workflow. Our current workflows are tasked with data harmonization across a number of different experimental platforms including whole genome sequencing, exome sequencing, and RNA-seq. The data processing is done via CAVATICA, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) based cloud computing platform associated with the Kids First DRC Portal co-developed by Seven Bridges Genomics, where workflows feature scatter-gather parallelization and AWS resource optimization. By utilizing such a framework, the DRC team has harmonized over 10,000 WGS and 1,000 RNA-Seq samples across 12 study cohorts within 8 months. This dataset in its current release includes samples from 40 pediatric brain cancers as well as 8 childhood birth defects with the outcome of delivering 150TB harmonized CRAM and 60TB gVCF. With a highly optimized bioinformatics pipeline powered by an efficient cloud-based execution workflow, The DRC platform processes one genome in about 11 hours with an average compute cost of $15 for whole genome alignment and germline variant calling. Here we present our observed challenges and identified opportunities in the analysis and integration of multi-disease pediatric genomic data on a large scale. Citation Format: Yuankun Zhu, Miguel Brown, Batsal Devkota, Bailey Farrow, Bogdan Gavrilovic, Allison Heath, Kyle Hernandez, Avi Kelman, Parimala Killada, Meen Chul Kim, Daniel Kolbman, Mateusz Koptyra, Milan Kovacevic, Maarten Leerkes, Alex Lubneuski, Michele Mattioni, Pichai Raman, Adam Resnick, Nikola Skundric, Deanne Taylor, Junjun Zhang, Bo Zhang, Phillip B. Storm. Genomic harmonization of the Data Resource Center for Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Program [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2019; 2019 Mar 29-Apr 3; Atlanta, GA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2019;79(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 2465.

The Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Program launched the Kids First Pediatric Data Resource Center (DRC) in 2017 as a collaborative, pediatric research effort with the goal of understanding the genetic causes of and links between childhood cancer and structural birth defects. The DRC is charged with developing data-driven platforms that integrate large amounts of genomic and clinical data, empowering the collaborative discovery, engagement, and necessary partnerships that are crucial for progress in our biological understanding of diseases, enabling rapid translation to personalized treatments for patients and accelerating discovery of genetic causes and shared biologic pathways within and across these conditions. The DRC is comprised of 3 cores including the Data Resource Portal Core, Data Coordination Core and the Administrative & Outreach Core (AOC). The AOC brings together researchers, physicians, and patient and foundation advocates to support collaborative research and data sharing to accelerate discoveries. The AOC specific aims are to employ outreach strategies including print, web, social media, in-person presentations, conferences, videos, webinars, e-newsletters, surveys, communication strategies, and reports to support accelerated discoveries. The AOC is committed to learning from the childhood cancer and birth defect communities. By capturing, synthesizing, and prioritizing unmet needs for development of the Kids First DRC portal, website, and materials, the AOC engages with researchers, clinicians, foundations, and patient advocates in the childhood cancer and structural birth defect communities. In its first year, the AOC partnered with 32 foundations to launch the Kids First DRC Portal and support data sharing throughout the research community. Key findings during the first six months of requirements gathering revealed the following unmet needs: a) Increase understanding of the disease types, research projects, and the investigators that are a part of the Kids First community b) Highlight the need for cross-disease analyses including structural birth defects and childhood cancers and c) Promote education on the data sharing, agreements, data availability and accessibility. The AOC, gathered pertinent user requirements, conducted educational activities, and engaged prospective users of the researcher community resulting in over 200 users and 22,000 portal views since launch and will continue to use feedback from the research community to further inform the development of the Kids First DRC tools and materials to meet the goals of the program. Citation Format: Tatiana S. Patton, Robert Moulder, Erin Alexander, Donna Vito, Jonathan Waller, Colleen Gaynor, Sarah Thomas, Bailey Farrow, Joseph Yamada, Kim Cullion, Danyelle Winchester, Angela Waanders, Allison Heath, Pichai Raman, Adam Resnick, Jena Lilly. Working together to put kids first: Outreach strategies driving collaborative research, data sharing and cross-disease analysis to accelerate discoveries in pediatric cancer and structural birth defects [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2019; 2019 Mar 29-Apr 3; Atlanta, GA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2019;79(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 3356.