TCGA or The Cancer Genome Atlas is a joint project started in 2006 between the NCI and the National Human Genome Research Institute. Over the past 16 years, over 20,000 primary cancer and matched normal samples spanning 33 cancer types have been characterized. A plethora of genomic, epigenomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic data has been produced and is publicly available for data mining.

This summer Corbin spent time learning how to utilize TCGA so that we were able to access the 2.5 petabytes of data that has been generated as part of the TCGA project. This training is instrumental to continuing to understand the molecular pathways underlying collagen’s involvement in metastatic breast cancer. With this training, we now have the capability of mining TCGA’s data sets for genomic/transcriptomic changes in collagens in samples from breast cancer patients …. Although this all sounds pretty technical …. It pretty much just means that we can use data already generated from patient samples in order to learn more about collagens and changes that may be occurring in metastatic breast cancer. This ability holds so much potential for the O’Connell lab and we are excited about putting it to use this fall!