Research/areas/childhood/childhood-cancer-data-initiative

Childhood Cancer Data Initiative (CCDI)

Amanda, a young cancer patient, and her mother Rosemary (left) at the NIH Clinical Center talking with a doctor from the NCI Pediatric Oncology Branch.

The Childhood Cancer Data Initiative (CCDI) focuses on the critical need to collect, analyze, and share data to address the burden of cancer in children, adolescents, and young adults (AYAs). The initiative would support childhood cancer research and aim to make it easier for researchers to learn from each of the approximately 16,000 children and adolescents diagnosed with cancer in the United States each year.

Tissue samples from patients with cancer in this age group are critically limited and a valuable resource. Data generated from these specimens are often fragmented and not broadly available to researchers and oncology teams. Maximizing the use of childhood and AYA cancer material and the resulting data will have a profound impact on our ability to prevent, diagnose, and treat this patient population, and can serve as a model for improving the use of data across cancer types and other disease continuums.

The CCDI is a proposed federal investment of $50 million per year for the next 10 years. These funds will allow NCI to enhance data collection for childhood cancers, ensure that data is accessible, and thereby incentivize the cancer research community to develop new treatments for children with cancer.

To increase data use and sharing in pursuit of progress against childhood cancers, the CCDI aims to:

Maximize every opportunity to improve treatments and outcomes for children with cancer

Build a connected data infrastructure to enable sharing of childhood cancer data from multiple sources

Identify opportunities to make data work better for patients, clinicians, and researchers

Develop and enhance tools and methods to extract knowledge from data

Childhood Cancer Data Initiative Activities

Engage with the CCDI through the activities listed below:

.Join the post-CCDI Symposium webinarExit Disclaimer on October 8, 2019

.Review the summary of ideas submitted to NCI’s questions about the CCDI

.Watch the CCDI Symposium and review accepted poster abstracts from July 29–July 31, 2019

.View the CCDI introductory webinarExit Disclaimer held July 18, 2019

.Receive email updates from NCI on the CCDI