NCI acting CBIT director says data sharing and new tools aim to speed cancer research

Dr. Jill Barnhold Sloan, acting director of the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) and associate director of informatics and data science, said the center’s priority is to "empower NCI staff and the cancer research community with data science, information technology, and data sharing tools" to speed research.

Sloan told Inside Cancer Careers that data sharing is essential because "data is everywhere" and is being generated faster than researchers can analyze it. She described the Office of Data Sharing (led by Jamie Goodree Avile) as responsible for helping investigators comply with the NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy, harmonize different types of data, and make datasets widely accessible. Sloan highlighted the Childhood Cancer Data Initiative as a major effort to consolidate pediatric cancer information into a single ecosystem for broad use.

CBIIT also includes an office of the chief information officer that manages NCI’s IT infrastructure, Sloan said, and an informatics and data science program responsible for defining data elements, harmonizing and organizing datasets, and developing analytics and algorithms. Sloan noted a team focuses on real‑world data — data collected in clinical care or claims rather than clinical trials — and cited electronic health records and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services–type claims as primary sources.

To lower technical barriers, Sloan said NCI is rolling out a new data-submission portal for the Cancer Research Data Commons and plans user-friendly tools "as easy to use as your web browser." She said making data accessible to clinicians, trainees, patient advocates and nontechnical users is a goal, and that patient advocates have been incorporated as data users to provide feedback on these efforts.

Sloan emphasized workforce development and culture change: investigators should think of themselves not only as data generators but also as data consumers, which would prompt better front-end planning of how data are organized and defined. On training, she urged grounding in basic statistics and data literacy even as AI and machine-learning tools advance: "don't worry about learning the AI and ML stuff. Make sure that you learn the basic statistics," she said, and recommended standard practices such as starting analysis by examining frequency tables ("start with the table 1").

Looking ahead, Sloan pointed listeners to resources and recordings she mentioned and said the new data-submission portal and additional tools are being phased in so a broader set of users can access and analyze NCI data assets.