Cohort Consortium
Overview
The Cohort Consortium is an extramural-intramural partnership formed by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to address the need for large-scale collaborations to pool the large quantity of data and biospecimens necessary to conduct a wide range of cancer studies. The Consortium, through its collaborative network of investigators, provides a coordinated, interdisciplinary approach to tackling important scientific questions, economies of scale, and opportunities to quicken the pace of research. View the Cohort Consortium's mission statement.
The Cohort Consortium includes investigators responsible for 43 high-quality cohorts involving more than 4 million people. The cohorts are international in scope and cover large and diverse populations. Extensive risk factor data are available on each cohort, and biospecimens including germline DNA collected at baseline, are available on more than 2 million individuals. Investigators team up to use common protocols and methods, and to conduct coordinated parallel and pooled analyses.
View a list of Cohort Consortium publications.
Membership
Learn more about the Cohort Consortium members.
Signature Initiatives and Other Projects
Dozens of initiatives have been launched by Cohort Consortium members, including the following four signature initiatives:
- The Body Mass Index (BMI) and All Cause Mortality Pooling Project is a collaborative effort among 19 prospective epidemiologic studies, encompassing 1.46 million adults, to examine and quantify the relationship between BMI and all-cause mortality.
- The Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium (BPC3) began in 2003 and was first funded to conduct collaborative studies of hormone-related gene variants and environmental factors involved in the development of breast and prostate cancer. This research involved 10 cohorts and pooled data on 8,850 patients with prostate cancer and 6,160 patients with breast cancer. The goal was to characterize common variations in about 55 candidate genes that mediate the steroid hormone metabolism and insulin-like growth factor signaling pathways, and associate these variations with cancer risk. In 2007, the BPC3 consortium received funding from the NCI to expand the number of cases/controls to 14,000 and 16,000 for breast and prostate cancer, respectively, and utilize a genome-wide association approach to identify genetic variants that may be associated with estrogen receptor negative (ER-) breast cancer, as well as aggressive forms of prostate cancer.
- The Pancreatic Cancer Cohort Consortium was formed in 2006 and has conducted two genome-wide association studies (GWAS). The studies have led to the discovery of novel regions in the genome associated with risk for pancreatic cancer. Additional epidemiologic and genetic studies using data from these initial studies are now under way. This Consortium includes pancreatic cancer cases and controls from prospective epidemiologic cohorts and hospital-based case-control studies. Funding is provided through grant support from the Epidemiology and Genomics Research Program (EGRP) in the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (DCCPS) for the extramural cohorts and by the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG) for its two participating cohorts.
- The Vitamin D Pooling Project (VDPP) is a nested case-control study that analyzed associations between serum vitamin D concentrations (25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) and development of certain rarer cancers – endometrial, esophageal, stomach, ovarian, pancreatic, and kidney cancers, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The study included data from more than 12,000 samples from 10 participating cohorts. The participation of eight cohorts was funded by EGRP, and two of the cohorts were supported by DCEG.
Other information about Cohort Consortium projects that may be of interest:
- List of active and approved projects
- Criteria for evaluation of Cohort Consortium pooling projects and actions/implications
- Project proposal online form
Annual Meetings
The 2012 Cohort Consortium Annual Meeting will be October 24-26, 2012 at Natcher Conference Center on the NIH Campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The main meeting will be October 25th and the ancillary project meetings will be October 24-26. More details coming soon.
View information about past meetings.
Contacts
Contact Nonye Harvey, M.P.H., EGRP Coordinator for questions related to the Cohort Consortium.
For questions related to other EGRP-supported epidemiology consortia, contact Daniela Seminara, Ph.D., M.P.H., EGRP Scientific Consortia Coordinator.
