A team at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center has developed a database structure to organize and more easily study cancer patient data.
Researchers published background information on the database, called Astro ID, on Dec. 25 in the Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer.
The structure organizes clinical data into tiers: deidentified patient details; diagnosis; clinical events; specimens; and how specimens were processed by the lab, according to a March 4 news release from Johns Hopkins.
To date, Johns Hopkins researchers have utilized the data structure across 16 patient groups with multiple tumor types, and have spatially mapped and tagged more than 1 billion cells.
“What this structure does is allow me to ask questions across all of this data that’s already been gathered, and across tumor types, and combine it all together in the context of the longitudinal patient experience,” Janis Taube, MD, director of the division of dermatopathology and co-director of the Tumor Microenvironment Laboratory at the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, said in the release.
In January, investigators from the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center made public a free resource to identify potential immune system responses of pancreatic cancer patients after treatment. The atlas contains data on 260 cytometry profiles from 64 patients who participated in three clinical trials studying pancreatic cancer vaccines and checkpoint inhibitors.
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