Large online brain cancer dataset—including genomics and imaging scans—released to the public

One of the two of the largest brain cancer data collections in the U.S. has been made publicly available to researchers worldwide through the Georgetown Database of Cancer (G-DOC), according to an Aug. 10 release from Georgetown University’s Lombardi Cancer Center.  

Information about the dataset—called REMBRANDT (REpository for Molecular BRAin Neoplasia DaTA)—contains biomedical information on 671 adult patients collected from 14 institutions. It was published Aug. 14 in the journal Scientific Data.  

The dataset has a web interface and contains genomic information from patients who volunteered to have their tumors sampled. It also contains brain imaging scans, RNA information and treatment and outcomes data, according to lead author of the paper Yuriy Gusev, PhD, associate professor and a faculty member of the Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics (ICBI) at Georgetown Lombardi, and colleagues.  

“We want this data to be widely used by the broadest audience—the entire biomedical research community—so that imagination and discovery is maximized,” Gusev said in a prepared statement. “Our common goal is to tease apart the clues hidden within this biomedical and clinical information in order to find ways that advance diagnostic and clinical outcomes for these patients.” 

Specifically, REMBRANDT includes genomic data from 261 samples of glioblastoma, 170 of astrocytoma, 86 tissues of oligodendroglioma, and a number that are mixed or of an unknown subclass as well as outcomes data that include more than 13,000 data points.  

“Researchers can search their gene of interest, check their expression and amplification status and link that to clinical outcomes,” said Subha Madhavan, PhD, chief data scientist at Georgetown University Medical Center and director of the ICBI. “They can save their findings to their workspace on the G-DOC site and share with their collaborators.”