NL-4C resource
The Dutch Comprehensive Childhood Cancer Commons, or NL-4C, is part of a world-wide effort to collect genomics and clinical data and make it available for research.
The NL-4C is a collection of harmonized omic (whole-genome and transcriptome sequencing) and clinical data of consented children treated at the Princess Máxima Center. By collecting this information, clinicians and researchers can better understand the genetic abnormalities underlying the different tumor subtypes, obtain new insights into tumor biology and ultimately advance drug development to provide better treatment options.
Purpose for research
Upon consent for collecting, processing and storing of patients’ material (e.g. tissue, blood or bone marrow) at the Maxima’s biobank, whole-genome and RNA sequencing are performed for research. The Maxima’s Big Data Core has developed computational analyses for sequenced material to detect somatic variants, single nucleotide variants (SNVs), insertions and deletions (indels), copy number variations (CNVs) and structural variants (SVs) as well as RNA-seq expression and gene-fusion analyses of patients’ tumor samples. These analyses help finding the genomic rearrangements present in pediatric cancer, ultimately serving to identify therapeutic targets, driving drug development and improving risk classification.
NL-4C portal
NL-4C provides a cloud-based portal that enables data visualization, exploration and building virtual cohorts to understand the clinical and genetic landscape of the Dutch pediatric cancer cohort. The portal is available only for authorized users from trusted organizations. The NL-4C currently hosts:
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What can users do?
Users from trusted organizations can:
| Explore clinical metadata and run customized queries on the dataset through the NL-4C portal. |
| Explore and visualize analyzed omics data through the NL-4CBioportal. |
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Importantly, the Big Data Core carefully curates and updates NL-4C data following standard Biobank and Data Access procedures. By adhering to institutional legal agreements and privacy regulations, the Big Data Core ensures patient information is safely used in the cloud, and children’s rights are preserved. NL-4C data is made available with the goal of accelerating pediatric cancer research and supporting precision medicine programs aimed at providing targeted therapies for individual children.
Contact
NL-4C is initiated by the Kemmeren group and is a scientific research infrastructure project funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), 2023-2028.
Princess Máxima Center project members
Patrick Kemmeren
Jayne Hehir-Kwa
Hinri Kerstens
Bas Tops
Harm van Tinteren
Jet Zoon
Karina Borja Jimenez