An Integrated TCGA Pan-Cancer Clinical Data Resource to Drive High-Quality Survival Outcome Analytics

Abstract

For a decade, The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) program collected clinicopathologic annotation data along with multi-platform molecular profiles of more than 11,000 human tumors across 33 different cancer types. TCGA clinical data contain key features representing the democratized nature of the data collection process. To ensure proper use of this large clinical dataset associated with genomic features, we developed a standardized dataset named the TCGA Pan-Cancer Clinical Data Resource (TCGA-CDR), which includes four major clinical outcome endpoints. In addition to detailing major challenges and statistical limitations encountered during the effort of integrating the acquired clinical data, we present a summary that includes endpoint usage recommendations for each cancer type. These TCGA-CDR findings appear to be consistent with cancer genomics studies independent of the TCGA effort and provide opportunities for investigating cancer biology using clinical correlates at an unprecedented scale.

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Affiliated Institutions

• Henry Ford Health System US
• Research Network (United States) US
• Institute for Systems Biology US
• Magee-Womens Research Institute US
• Walter Reed National Military Medical Center US
• University of Pittsburgh US
• Windber Research Institute US
• Nationwide Children's Hospital US
• NYU Langone Health US
• The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center US
• Buck Institute for Research on Aging US
• Sage Bionetworks US
• Broad Institute US
• University of California, San Francisco US
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill US
• Cancer Research Center US
• UPMC Hillman Cancer Center US

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