- 11 November, 2025
On Tuesday, November 11, 2025 (09:00 – 17:00), the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) was hosting a one-day symposium titled “cBioPortal – Making cancer data accessible for all”. The event was co-organized with Health-RI and the CANDLE project.
Personalized cancer medicine increasingly depends on integrating clinical, molecular, imaging, and pathology data into a continuous learning health-care system. cBioPortal is a widely used, open-source platform that enables researchers and clinicians to visualize, explore, and share multidimensional cancer genomics data. First developed at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), it is now maintained by a global community including the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) and several other European partners. This symposium marked 15 years of cBioPortal’s development and its growing impact in personalized medicine. The event attracted over 100 participants worldwide.
The assembly was opened by Prof. Gerrit Meijer, pathologist, CSO of Health-RI, and Group Leader at NKI, who illustrated the history of Health-RI (and its predecessor projects) in the efforts to defragment point solutions aiming to enable faster, better, and practice-changing cancer research. He walked us through the blueprint of European Health Data Space (EHDS) digital business capability, illustrating the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity EHDS offers for streamlined data access in Europe. National implementation of EHDS requires hand-in-hand collaboration between data users, data holders, and data infrastructure developers. Connecting national cancer research communities with existing health data infrastructure solutions is at the heart of National Cancer Data Nodes (NCDN) and the CANDLE project.
Dr. Lifang Liu, M.D, PhD, CANDLE project coordinator and oncology node coordinator at Health-RI introduced the project and demonstrated the exemplar NCDN-NL: how the members of the NCDN-NL work together in working groups (WP users & data; WP infrastructure and tools; WP stakeholder engagement; WP EHDS alignment) to deliver solutions to data challenges.
Prof. Nikolaus Schultz and JianJiong Gao from MSKCC gave an overview of the history of the cBioPortal and its capability in bringing multi-modal data together longitudinally along diagnostics, treatments, tests, responses, and outcomes along the patient journey, which is a liveshow of ‘evidence-based personalized cancer medicine’ in practice!
During the following session, several speakers shared Dutch users’ experiences with cBioportal. Sam de Vos (PMC) showed how pediatric hospital data in cBioPortal enhances research collaboration and transparency. In another talk, Dr. Remond Fijneman of NKI demonstrated a ctDNA multicenter study integration using cBioPortal and how it aided in improving trial reproducibility; Ruslan Forostianov and Guizela Huelsz Prince of SE4BIO discussed expanding patient-level searches in real time, across borders, and Dr. Henk-Jan van den Ham from The Hyve shared perspectives from the Dutch DevOps community on sustainability and user-driven innovation.
Inspiring new developments and common data models were presented by the following speakers: Prof. Hauke Busch of University Lübeck described how German Molecular Tumor Boards integrate cBioPortal into national clinical workflows, with the possibility of incorporating patient-reported outcomes. Dr. Melle Sieswerda of IKNL presented the oncology common data model aligning EHRs and registries for interoperability, starting from the data source, while Prof. Stefan Klein of EMC held a talk addressing radiology-genomics data linkage challenges using XNAT, emphasizing semantic consistency. Dr. Wendy de Leng of UMCU highlighted the integration of molecular pathology (PALGA) data into cBioPortal to enrich the diagnostic context. In the following presentation, Dr. Joep de Ligt of HMF discussed whole-genome sequencing data interoperability within the cBioPortal framework.
The day ended with a forward-looking speech by Dr. Ino de Bruijn of MSKCC, who successfully defended his PhD thesis the day before on Nov 10 2025. Congrats, Dr. Ino, again, for your promotion and also showing us the future of cBioportal and collaborative opportunities.
Some messages to take home:
- cBioPortal enables true personalized cancer medicine by sharing and visualizing multimodal data, going with patients through each critical decision along the cancer journey;
- cBioPortal enables multimodal data integration in Molecular Tumor Boards in a clinical environment while gathering Real World Data to establish a Learning Healthcare System.
- EHDS offers a once-in-a-life opportunity to scale up the impact of cBioPortal through a streamlined data access workflow across Europe;
- National Cancer Data Nodes (CANDLE project) are the national focal points for data holders, data users, and data infrastructure developers to jointly remove obstacles along the use of cancer data.
Many thanks to all who attended this landmark cBioPortal event. We look forward to seeing you soon in many collaborative activities. Last but not least, special thanks to the outstanding organizing committee: Mariska Bierkens, Iris Huitink, Adria Closa Mosquera, and Pauline van Mulligen for the seamless runthrough of the event.
See you soon (Tot Snel!)
Check out the symposium slides: 10.5281/zenodo.17608635
