Fast track proposals will be accepted.
Direct-to-Phase II proposals will not be accepted.
Number of anticipated awards: 3-5
Budget (total costs, per award):
Phase I: up to $252,131 for up to 9 months
Phase II: up to $1,680,879 for up to 2 years
PROPOSALS THAT EXCEED THE BUDGET OR PROJECT DURATION LISTED ABOVE MAY NOT BE FUNDED.
The cancer research field has become intensely focused on the generation of high-throughput datasets to better understand cancer and ultimately to inform the development of better treatment and prevention tools. NIH and NCI have supported numerous programs including The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatment (TARGET), and Clinical Proteomic Tumor Atlas Consortium (CPTAC) to generate a wealth of data to be leveraged by the cancer research community. However, we are still limited in our ability to draw insights and meaningful interpretations from these datasets, which include multi-omics, imaging, population, and clinical data, by challenges in integration across disparate datasets. To address these challenges, NCI has created the Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) as part of the National Cancer Data Ecosystem recommended by the Cancer Moonshot Blue Ribbon Panel (BRP). The CRDC brings together data with cloud computing infrastructure to provide secure access to various data types across scientific domains, allowing users to analyze, share, and store results by leveraging the storage and elastic compute of the cloud.
The primary goal of this contract topic is to solicit commercial sector participation in the CRDC to develop strong commercial analytic tools that can be disseminated and sustained within the cancer research community. The SBIR contract funding mechanism will offer small businesses the opportunity to contribute solutions to address unmet challenges of big data analysis that are not currently provided by the existing tools in the CRDC by developing and extending tools and resources to integrate into the rapidly evolving CRDC. Through this contract topic, NCI seeks to enable wider engagement of the CRDC community by offering enhanced data analysis capabilities, visualization tools, and data access and sharing platforms. This topic is relevant to the BRP recommendation to develop a national cancer data ecosystem for sharing and analysis.
The goal of this contract topic is to provide support for development and implementation of innovative solutions for continued advancement and evolution of cloud-based informatics tools to integrate with the CRDC for broader user community engagement. Unmet challenges that should be addressed through this solicitation include but are not limited to: 1) Integration of existing tools widely utilized by the cancer research community with the CRDC through adoption of the Data Commons Framework (DCF), and extension of these tools to support unique data analysis opportunities of this platform; 2) Development of novel tools that operate across the CRDC and other data commons such as Gabriella Miller’s Kids First for multi-domain analysis; 3) Collaboration with academic developers of popular tools to integrate them with the CRDC and support commercialization. Development and adaptation of tools that support innovative, integrative data analysis across the CRDC are of particular interest. The activities that fall within the scope of this contract topic include delivery of design specification for the development/extension of informatics tools and demonstration of early phase prototype that shows successful integration with CRDC. Examples of effective integration with CRDC through DCF include execution of the offeror’s pre-existing or new informatics tools on datasets stored in CRDC such as TCGA and performing co-analysis with user-provided data. Successful offerors are expected to develop and implement a business process for broad adoption of their tools and resources by actively engaging with the user communities and conducting outreach and training activities as well as providing appropriate system documentation. The business process should also include business plans for marketing and long-term sustainability, such as sustained hosting of tools, training, and associated resources.
Activities outside the scope of this Topic:
Proposals for the development of big data analysis tools without consideration for integration with the CRDC will not be considered for award under this Topic.
The proposed Phase I research is expected to clearly demonstrate at minimum a ‘proof of concept’ feasibility of adaption of the offeror’s informatics tool(s) to the CRDC through the Data Commons Framework. The proposal should identify potential barriers for commercial translation and plans to overcome those barriers. Phase I work should include software system specifications of cloud-based platforms for Phase II deployment of the proposed tools and resources.
Key activities and deliverables include:
Phase II projects will be expected to implement requirements identified in all Phase I deliverables and launch a prototype that demonstrates successful integration with CRDC and, as appropriate, other data commons. The system design process should encourage interactions between users and developers for evaluation and further advancement of the tools and resources.
Key activities and deliverables include:
Receipt date: October 23, 2019, 5:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time
Apply for this topic on the Contract Proposal Submission (eCPS) website.
For full PHS2020-1 Contract Solicitation, CLICK HERE.