Quantitative Data Sciences Core Facility Shared Resource

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ABSTRACT – QUANTITATIVE DATA SCIENCES CORE The Quantitative Data Sciences Core (QDSC) provides a state-of-the-art integrated approach for Data Science support to Lurie Cancer Center (LCC) members in the basic, clinical and population sciences. ‘Data Sciences’ includes the three disciplines of Biostatistics, Bioinformatics and Clinical Informatics. Since the last CCSG review, the former Biostatistics Core and Cancer Informatics Core have been integrated into a new QDSC to provide a unified approach to data definition, acquisition, management, analysis and reporting. The QDSC Director is Alfred Rademaker PhD; Associate Directors are Denise Scholtens PhD (Biostatistics), Matthew Schipma PhD (Bioinformatics) and Firas Wehbe MD,PhD (Clinical Informatics). As part of this consolidation, the core has been expanded through the addition of faculty and staff effort bridging the fields of informatics and statistics, areas of expertise often sought together by members of the LCC. The QDSC also works collaboratively with the Pathology Core Facility, the Outcomes Measurement and Survey Core, and the LCC Clinical Trials Office. The Biostatistics component provides power calculations and statistical analyses to investigators who are planning and conducting basic and preclinical studies and assists in the development of early phase and randomized clinical trials. The Bioinformatics component provides support for the analysis of next generation sequencing data, pathway identification, variant detection, methylation analysis, and data visualization. The Clinical Informatics component provides clinical trial management, disease-based database and informatics tools, project specific Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) development, pathology data management, and support for accessing and analyzing Northwestern Medicine Electronic Data Warehouse (NMEDW) data. QDSC Clinical Informatics has integrated and augmented the Northwestern Oncology Trial Information System (NOTIS), LCC’s clinical trial management system, and the electronic medical record (Epic) used by our clinical partners. QDSC has been heavily used by cancer researchers, with 109 LCC members using the Core in the last year, and it has been instrumental in the publication of 151 papers, many in high impact journals. Moreover, it has contributed to the success of many grant applications, notable among them a renewal of a SPORE in Prostate Cancer and a new U54 Chicago Collaborative to Promote and Advance Cancer Health Equity.