Sage Bionetworks Unveils New Portal to Provide Community Access to AACR Project GENIE Data

The great challenge of advancing precision medicine for cancer has been access to sufficient datasets from clinical patients.

The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) launched Project GENIE(Genomics Evidence Neoplasia Information Exchange) in 2015 and the Biopharma Collaborative (BPC) in 2019 to assemble and share real-world clinico-genomic data that can power precision oncology and clinical decision making.

As AACR’s strategic partner for the past decade and the data coordinating center for both initiatives, Sage Bionetworks has developed a new AACR Project GENIE Data Portal, providing researchers with an online explorer of up-to-date datasets and other relevant resources.

“Until this portal was created, AACR Project GENIE and BPC data have been processed and stored in two separate places on our data platform, Synapse,” says Thomas Yu, Associate Director of Data Processing & Engineering at Sage Bionetworks. “Now, we have a centralized, open-access portal to bridge these different datasets in a way that will accelerate cancer research. We want this portal to be an all-inclusive resource for scientists working on clinical cancer genomic data.”

The portal currently hosts data from genomically profiled patients treated at 19 international cancer centers, allowing scientists to explore new cancer drug targets and outcomes of personalized medicine.

As new datasets become available from both AACR initiatives, the portal provides users with real-time updates on public data releases. The most recent AACR Project GENIE releases include:

• Nearly 200,000 sequenced samples from more than 170,000 patients, including 7,200 pediatric patients.
• Samples spanning 111 major cancer types and 787 unique cancer subtypes.
• Deep clinical annotations of 1,486 patients with colorectal cancer and 1,846 patients with non-small cell lung cancer. Three additional cohorts with breast cancer, pancreatic cancer and prostate cancer patients are planned for release later in the year and early 2025.

In addition to the openly available datasets, the new portal directs users to a relevant bank of publications that cite AACR Project GENIE data, an evolving list of contributors and collaborators and a series of external tools for data visualization and analysis.

“We have seen year-on-year increases in community use of GENIE data, and envision the new GENIE data portal significantly increasing data usage even further,” says Shawn Sweeney, PhD, Senior Director of AACR Project GENIE. “Additionally, we hope the portal will catalyze new collaborations and yield new insights in cancer biology with therapeutic potential.”