Purpose: The Blood Profiling Atlas in Cancer (BloodPAC) Data Commons (BPDC) is being developed and is operated by the public-private BloodPAC Consortium to support the liquid biopsy community. It is an interoperable data commons with the ultimate aim of serving as a recognized source of valid scientific evidence for liquid biopsy assays for industry, academia, and standards and regulatory stakeholders.
Methods: The BPDC is implemented using the open source Gen3 data commons platform (https://gen3.org). In particular, the BPDC Data Exploration Portal, BPDC Data Submission Portal, the BPDC Workspace Hub, and the BloodPAC application programming interface (API) were all automatically generated from the BloodPAC Data Model using the Gen3 data commons platform. BPDC uses Gen3's implementation of the data commons framework services so that it can interoperate through secure, compliant APIs with other data commons using data commons framework service, such as National Cancer Institute's Cancer Research Data Commons.
Results: The BPDC contains 57 studies and projects spanning more than 4,100 cases. This amounts to 5,700 aliquots (blood plasma, serum, or a contrived sample) that have been subjected to a liquid biopsy assay, quantified, and then contributed by members of the BloodPAC Consortium. In all, there are more than 31,000 files in the commons as of December 2020. We describe the BPDC, the data it manages, the process that the BloodPAC Consortium used to develop it, and some of the applications that have been developed using its API.
Conclusion: The BPDC has been the data platform used by BloodPAC during the past 4 years to manage the data for the consortium and to provide workspaces for its working groups.