Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Facility

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT – SHARED RESOURCE: BIOSTATISTICS AND BIOINFORMATICS FACILITY The Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Facility (BBF) is a shared, institutional resource for biostatistics and bioinformatics collaboration and related methodological research. It is recognized Center-wide as a critical component of the research infrastructure and serves FCCC members from all three Research Programs. The BBF was rated "Outstanding" during the last CCSG review. The BBF, with the direction of Eric Ross, PhD (CPC) and a staff of 9, provides FCCC members with rigorous biostatistics and bioinformatics design, analysis and interpretation of experiments and studies. Facility staff are broadly skilled in quantitative and computational methods for clinical trials, preclinical analyses, biological experiments, translational investigations and cancer prevention and control studies. Its members embrace new problems and technologies that surface in a rapidly changing scientific environment. Facility biostatisticians play essential roles in all phases of study planning, reporting and design, including sample size determination, randomization, and interim and final analyses. Bioinformaticians provide expertise for the analysis and exploration of diverse laboratory results including high- throughput data. All FCCC members have ready access to the BBF’s coordinated and cost effective services. The BBF supports FCCC’s high-performance cluster for computationally intensive analyses; and maintains a variety of statistical and bioinformatics software packages, including commercial and open-source tools for data analysis; visualization; sample size and power estimation; sequence analysis; pathway and network analysis; and annotation. Its interactions with laboratory, cancer control, translational and clinical investigators have extended the interpretation of experimental data and contributed substantially to FCCC research. The BBF’s faculty and staff published 300 manuscripts from 2019 to 2023. Development of specialized biostatistics and bioinformatics methods in support of Cancer Center projects resulted in 18 methodology/first author publications on the analysis of high-throughput molecular data and observational data. From 2019-2023, the BBF provided over 39,000 hours of support to the research activities of 112 FCCC members from all three Research Programs. From December 2022 through November 2023, the research of 87 FCCC members benefited from 10,949 consulting hours; 81% or 9,219 hours supported FCCC members with peer-reviewed funding. The BBF reviews the statistical soundness of all protocols involving human subjects in conjunction with the Research Review Committee. A new high performance computing cluster was purchased in 2023 with institutional funds ($808, 944) to address the Center’s growing computational needs. Recommendations of a dedicated Facility Advisory Committee (FAC) are directed to a governing Facility Parent Oversight Committee (FPOC) that ensures the BBF has the resources needed to provide the highest quality quantitative services to FCCC members. Demand for services is expected to increase during the next CCSG cycle due to recruitment to all three Research Programs.