Core 1 - Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core (BBC)

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT – CORE 1 - BIOSTATISTICS AND BIOINFORMATICS CORE (BBC) The goal of the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core (BBC) is to collaborate with SPORE Investigators and other Core resource scientists to ensure that research undertaken in the UCSF Prostate Cancer SPORE is rigorous, reproducible and of the highest quality. The BBC will provide SPORE projects with biostatistical and bioinformatics support tailored to the specifics of the science and the needs of each project in a timely fashion. Support will be provided in all stages of the research projects, from the formulation of the research question, experimental design, data collection, analysis, through to reporting and dissemination of results. The laboratory, clinical and translational studies proposed by the UCSF Prostate SPORE projects require a wide range of statistical and bioinformatics expertise including design and analysis of pre-clinical experiments, design and analysis of clinical trials, and the processing and analysis of complex multi-level genome sequencing data. The BBC has extensive experience conducting and monitoring clinical trials and analyzing trial results. On the bioinformatics side, the BBC includes experts in genomic data quality control, germline and somatic variant analysis, transcriptomics, methylation analysis, ChIP-seq, and ATAC-seq analysis. The BBC Core is the repository for the vast amounts of genomic data directly generated by SPORE projects and additional data sources necessary to their analysis. The BBC maintains a large computational resource available to all SPORE investigators to provide storage and compute infrastructure for all SPORE projects. The core will also maintain and continue to develop the Translational Research Database. This resource allows rapid sharing and cross- fertilization of observations between SPORE projects by integrating preclinical, clinical, genomics, and non-PHI clinical trials data. The Translational Research Database hosts only de-identified data, and will be available to qualified researchers who are participants in Spore projects. Access to the Translational Research Database will be managed by the BBC. The BBC is also responsible for ensuring that genomic data, metadata, and computational analysis generated by the SPORE projects are appropriately made available to the research community in accordance with NIH data sharing policies, and it manages the data access agreements in coordination with individual project leaders and SPORE leadership.