Abstract
The prospective banking of osteosarcoma tissue samples to promote research endeavors has been realized through the establishment of a nationally centralized biospecimen repository, the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) biospecimen bank located at the Biopathology Center (BPC)/Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Although the physical inventory of osteosarcoma biospecimens is substantive (>15,000 sample specimens), the nature of these resources remains exhaustible. Despite judicious allocation of these high-value biospecimens for conducting sarcoma-related research, a deeper understanding of osteosarcoma biology, in particular metastases, remains unrealized. In addition the identification and development of novel diagnostics and effective therapeutics remain elusive. The QuadW-COG Childhood Sarcoma Biostatistics and Annotation Office (CSBAO) has developed the High Dimensional Data (HDD) platform to complement the existing physical inventory and to promote in silico hypothesis testing in sarcoma biology. The HDD is a relational biologic database derived from matched osteosarcoma biospecimens in which diverse experimental readouts have been generated and digitally deposited. As proof-of-concept, we demonstrate that the HDD platform can be utilized to address previously unrealized biologic questions though the systematic juxtaposition of diverse datasets derived from shared biospecimens. The continued population of the HDD platform with high-value, high-throughput and mineable datasets allows a shared and reusable resource for researchers, both experimentalists and bioinformatics investigators, to propose and answer questions in silico that advance our understanding of osteosarcoma biology.
Highlights
Osteosarcoma is a cancer of the bone that is most common in the pediatric and young adult population [1]
Biospecimen requests from sarcoma researchers spanning 2004–2014, which satisfied scientific criteria to justify dispersion of biologic samples from the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) biospecimen bank located at the Biopathology Center (BPC)/Nationwide Children’s Hospital, were identified and used to develop a preliminary project list
Individual research investigators identified on the final project list were contacted by Osteosarcoma Biology committee leadership with the request for voluntary data sharing and digital data importation into the High Dimensional Data (HDD) platform
Summary
Osteosarcoma is a cancer of the bone that is most common in the pediatric and young adult population [1]. A complementary and alternative mechanism for sarcoma biology discovery can be through the creation of a reusable biological database derived from the findings of past, ongoing, and future research investigations. Expected outcomes of such a shared resource would be multifold, including timely data sharing by investigative groups for expediting new and global discoveries, minimizing redundant or repetitive investigations which carry the risk for depleting exhaustible banked biospecimens, and encouraging the practice of in silico hypothesis testing by both conventional experimentalists and bioinformatics investigators that requires minimal upfront resource allocations and can accelerate the development of more focused research efforts
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