ICGC has been organized to launch and coordinate a large number of research projects that have the common aim of comprehensively elucidating the genomic changes present in many types of cancers. Its primary goals are to generate comprehensive catalogues of genomic abnormalities in different cancer types and to make the data available to the entire research community with minimal restrictions. At the end of 2013, 71 cancer genome projects across 16 countries and the EU were ongoing, and the ICGC released the genomic data from 8,532 cancer samples as Release 14 (September 26th, 2013). Our RIKEN group has been involved with the genome project of liver cancer, which is one of the most common and deadly cancers worldwide, especially in Asia. We performed whole genome sequencing (WGS) of 270 liver cancers and called somatic mutations by using our in-house pipeline. We deposited WGS data of 153 liver cancers so far, and released them as a Japanese ICGC project. As an internal working group, we are involved with benchmark comparison studies, where eleven genome centers analyze the same raw sequence data or the same DNA by each of their pipelines and sequencing platforms to compare their results of somatic mutation identification. ICGC has launched a “pan-cancer” genome project, where 2000~ cancer WGS data will be analyzed in the same pipeline by a world-wide collaboration. We are contributing to this ambitious project as a member of technical working group and data center, as well as by providing 300 WGS data.

Figure: ICGC Data Release 14 (September 26th, 2013)