May 23, 2018
OICR’s Cancer Genome Collaboratory wins 2018 OpenStack Superuser award for contributions to the cancer research community
Based on popular vote and review by the Superuser Editorial Advisory Board, OICR’s Cancer Genome Collaboratory team has won the 2018 OpenStack Vancouver Summit Superuser Award. The Award recognizes OICR’s use of OpenStack, an open-source software platform for cloud computing, to enable cancer research worldwide. Previous winners of the Superuser Award include AT&T, CERN and Comcast.
“We’re proud to be recognized by the greater research community that we support,” Vincent Ferretti, Director and Senior Principal Investigator, Genome Informatics at OICR, says. “OpenStack has helped us contribute to the cancer research community in Ontario, across Canada and internationally.”
February 13, 2017
International collaboration cooks up powerful new software: MISO
Keeping track of samples and organizing their associated data is a crucial part of the research process. Like many labs around the world, those at OICR were using a commercially available Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) to perform this task. However, the researchers using it found that this tool placed far too many constraints on their work. So what did they do? They built their own in partnership with the Earlham Institute (EI) in the U.K. This collaboration has resulted in powerful, flexible and open source software called MISO (Managing Information for Sequencing Operations).
Continue reading – International collaboration cooks up powerful new software: MISO
October 18, 2016
Reactome releases 10,000th annotated human protein, a major milestone that will benefit research community
Open source tools like Wikipedia and Google Maps help us get things done faster in our daily lives. In the same way, researchers rely on a variety of open source tools to help them make discoveries faster. Reactome (www.reactome.org) is one such tool. Researchers use it because it relates human genes, proteins and other biomolecules to the biological pathways and processes in which they participate, helping to facilitate new cancer research breakthroughs. Earlier this month Reactome reached a major milestone when it released its 10,000th annotated human protein to the research community. We spoke to OICR’s Dr. Robin Haw, who is Project Manager and Outreach Coordinator at Reactome, about the history of the project, the importance of this particular milestone and where the project is headed next.
