Data Catalyst

What is the Data Catalyst?

Formerly known as the Data Innovation Awards, our Data Catalyst aims to maximise the impact of cancer datasets that may have commercial value. The catalyst does this through providing funding and support to help researchers make these datasets more accessible and usable by third parties including commercial entities.

The end goal is to produce a high-quality cancer dataset that adheres to FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) and can be made available to third parties for further research and product development.

What does the Data Catalyst provide?

The catalyst provides researchers with up to £100k funding to be used to support cleaning, annotation, curation, linking or storage of data that has significant commercial potential.

In addition to funding, our team will work with you to develop a long-term data-sharing strategy and investigate consent and background agreement status to ensure that all the necessary approvals and rights are in place to enable safe, secure and transparent commercial data partnerships.

Eligibility

We are looking for researchers that have generated a high-quality cancer dataset or are working on a project that will generate one in the future, where there is a need for additional funding to make the dataset suitable for sharing. You do not need to have Cancer Research UK funding to apply. However, we do require a commitment from all recipients of the Data Catalyst to enable Cancer Research Horizons to lead on the reuse of the dataset by academic and commercial third parties. In addition, to ensure that this aim can be achieved, we expect all applicants to have appropriate ethical approvals to enable the reuse of data by third party researchers both internationally and at commercial entities or a plan to secure such approval.

The Data Catalyst is focussed on maximising the potentially of cancer datasets that have secondary use potential and to assess this potential we assess the following characteristics:

Size of dataset	Depth of data	Multidimensionality of data
>100 subjects, although there is flexibility for particularly rare indications or where multiple complex profiling approaches have been employed.	Several different data types are linked together for each subject (e.g. WGS, digital pathology and RNA-seq data)	Data is generated from multiple time points (longitudinal) or multiple samples from the same subject

How can I apply?

Applications are managed by the Cancer Research Horizons team and reviewed by an internal panel of experts called the Project Review Group.

Your local Search & Evaluation representative can support you in developing an application. The application should focus mainly on the value of the data that has been, or will be, generated, but will also require you to outline how you intend to spend the funding and how this will increase the availability and/or utility of the data. Any existing or previous evidence of commercial interest in accessing your datasets will greatly enhance your application.