The Informatics Shared Resource (ISR) of the Cancer Research Center of Hawai`i (CRCH) was established as a core facility in 2004. Its goal is to promote multidisciplinary collaboration, and enhance the research excellence and productivity of CRCH by providing access to informatics expertise and computational support to all members of the Center. The prime objective of the ISR is to facilitate the management, sharing, and integration of data, as well as synthesis of data sets from basic, clinical, and population sciences. In addition to the support in broad-spectrum informatics and computing infrastructure, the bioinformatics group of the ISR also collaborates with investigators to help incorporate cutting-edge genomic and/or proteomic approaches in their research, and supports for bioinformatics tools that enable investigators to take full advantage of advanced computational methods to expand their research capacity. Services of the ISR include:

Database design and programming
The ISR provides consultation on design issues of complex relational as well as hierarchical information/database systems. Programmers within the ISR develop these systems with consultation from investigators and users, and are also available for consultation to researchers developing database systems.

Data storage, extraction, sharing, integration and synthesis of data sets
Consultation is provided on data management issues to ensure that the complex data from diverse sources can be aggregated in appropriate ways. The ISR will aid researchers in publishing their data for use by others, if desired. ISR programmers provide consultation to investigators on appropriate ways to structure, retrieve/extract, integrate or set up specific data sets for downstream statistical data analysis.

Computer software review and algorithm development
The ISR reviews and develops computer software tools/algorithms and provides investigators with software recommendation to meet their needs. We have expertise in general common programming languages and tools such as HTML, JAVA, C, C++, Python, Visual Basic and Visual C++; as well as specialized bioinformatics tools such as Perl, R and Bioconductor packages.

Bioinformatics support in genomics and proteomics research
The ISR provides consultation and support on use of genomics and proteomics resources available for public use, such as the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) resources (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/), The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) resources (http://www.tigr.org/), and the Protein Data Bank (PDB) resources (http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/). In particular, the ISR will provide computational expertise in software design and programming support of bioinformatics tools for genetic data, molecular sequence data, genomic/proteomic data, and support for biomolecular structure simulation and visualization programs. The ISR will help integrate bioinformatics tools and data management systems in an interactive environment for investigators to use. Information on data sources for mammalian genetics (e.g. the Mouse Genome Informatics at the Jackson Laboratory http://www.informatics.jax.org/), a variety of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data, microarray data and clinical information (e.g. the NCI Center for Bioinformatics’ cancer Bioinformatics Infrastructure Objects (caBIO) interface http://ncicb.nci.nih.gov/core/caBIO/) will be compiled, compared and used.

The CRCH has been a participating member of the NCI Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) project (http://cabig.nci.nih.gov) since the project was launched in February 2004. The caBIG project is a multi-centered large initiative to build an informatics infrastructure for the development and sharing of tools and data in an open environment with common standards. In parallel with our participation in the caBIG project, the ISR is spearheading the effort to adopt the caBIG framework to build an integrative web-based system for all informatics needs at the CRCH. The ISR will be collaborating with other shared resources (e.g. the Biostatistics Shared Resource, the Genotyping Shared Resource, the Nutrition Support Shared Resource, the Analytical Laboratory Shared Resource, the Pathology Shared Resource, and the Clinical Protocol and Data Management Shared Resource) as well as working closely with the Maui High Performance Computing Center and the Science Applications International Corporation on this endeavor.

The Informatics Shared Resource currently consists of 3 faculty and 7.3 FTE. ISR members are housed mainly within the Epidemiology Program and the Cancer Prevention and Control Program, the two programs with the greatest current need for informatics. We anticipate that the basic scientists in the Natural Products and Cancer Biology Program will have increasing needs for bioinformatics and chemoinformatics support.

Current Resource Members

Shared Resource Director
Gordon Okimoto, Ph.D.

Lynne Wilkens, M.S., Dr.P.H.
Kerry Kakazu, Ph.D.
Peter Hinely, M.S.
Heide Miller-Pakvasa, M.S.
Hang Le Galanis, M.S.
Emil Srvcina, M.S.
Xin Zhao, M.E.E. (Ph.D. Student, Department of Information and Computer Science)
Jeff Ryan, B.S. (Ph.D. Student, Department of Mathematics)
Maj Earle, B.S.
Yun Oh Jung, B.S.
Katharine McDuffie, B.S.
Jennifer Yamamoto, B.S.
Wendy Richards, B.B.A.
Karla Floresca, B.B.A.
Quoc Le, B.B.A.
Joel Julian

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