Discover how Sage Bionetworks powers cancer data sharing and collaboration at AACR 2026 in San Diego by Adam Taylor
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Sage Bionetworks will be at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting in San Diego this April 17-22 with 3 posters. Whether you're a researcher already using the data we curate, someone curious about what's available, a funder thinking about community coordination and data infrastructure for a new program, or an organization looking for a flexible platform for managing and sharing cancer research data, come find us.
We build and run community and data coordination platforms for large-scale cancer research including the Human Tumor Atlas Network (HTAN), the Multi-Consortia (MC2) Coordinating Center, AACR Project GENIE, and others. More than 140 members of those communities are presenting at this year's AACR meeting, and we'll be there all week alongside them.
Who you can meet, and what you’ll hear about.
Adam Taylor, Orion Banks, Xindi Guo, and Ziwei Pan will be at the meeting all week. We’d love to see you at one of our posters or see you for a coffee and a chat. Please do reach out!
Synapse.org as a foundational platform supporting multi-center cancer data coordination, benchmarking, and broad community reuse
Sunday April 19, 2:00 PM, GENIE session, Posterboard 1 https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/21436/presentation/3389
Synapse.org hosts over 3.6 PB of data used by more than 6,000 monthly users across HTAN, GENIE, MC2 Center, and other programs. This poster covers how one platform handles data coordination, access control, and interoperability with cloud research environments like Cavatica, Terra, and SevenBridges CGC. We'll also show new work on AI-assisted curation and natural-language search across datasets. If you manage data for a consortium or multi-site study and want to see how Synapse works under the hood, this is the one.
The Cancer Complexity Knowledge Portal: A FAIR-aligned tool for resource discovery.
Monday April 20, 2:00 PM, Posterboard 21 https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/21436/presentation/3358
Supported by the MC2 Center, the Cancer Complexity Knowledge Portal (CCKP) gives researchers a single place to find datasets, tools, publications, and other outputs from six NCI-funded cancer biology consortia (CSBC, PS-ON, TEC, CCBIR, MetNet, PDMC). It currently links 160 grants, 4,178 publications, 1,039 datasets, and 321 tools. This poster covers how the portal works, how resources are curated and connected, and where it's headed. If you've ever struggled to find what data or tools came out of an NCI-funded program, this poster is for you.
Reading the map: An invitation to the resources of the Human Tumor Atlas Network.
Tuesday April 21, 9:00 AM, Posterboard 19 https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/21436/presentation/3141
Five years of HTAN have produced 334 TB of multimodal data from 2,372 cases and 11,378 biospecimens, spanning over 60 disease types and 25 assays, with more than 3,400 registered users. This poster walks through what's in the atlas, how to access it, and what people are building with the data. If you work with tumor atlases or spatial biology and haven't explored HTAN yet, start here.
HTAN at AACR
Sage is a member of the Human Tumor Atlas Network Data Coordinating Center, curating data and resources mapping transitions in cancer. 40 HTAN investigators from 13 atlases are on the program this year. A few highlights:
The week opens Thursday April 17 with an HTAN educational session, Decoding Tumor Evolution through the Human Tumor Atlas Network: An Ecological and Evolutionary Perspective, chaired by Sudhir Srivastava (NCI), with invited talks from Irene Ghobrial (Dana-Farber) and Li Ding (Washington University).
Rong Fan (Yale) presents on spatially decoding human lymphoma on Tuesday and co-chairs the hematology minisymposium on Monday.
Linghua Wang (MD Anderson) leads a Friday methods workshop on AI pathology and spatial omics.
Mingyao Li (Penn) presents on AI-powered tissue maps on Monday.
Several atlases are bringing multiple investigators.
The GAME3D gastric cancer atlas from Vanderbilt has six people presenting, including Tae Hyun Hwang on "The 4D oncologist: AI that watches the drug work" in the agentic AI session on Wednesday, plus posters from Inyeop Jang, Jean Clemenceau, Minji Kim, Seock-Jin Chung, and Sunho Park covering spatial multi-omics, 3D subcellular modeling, and AI-driven drug evaluation.
The OHSU pancreatic atlas brings Andrew Adey (single-cell DNA methylation, Monday), Sha Cao (segmentation-free spatial transcriptomics, Wednesday), and Laura Wood, who presents on molecular alterations in pancreatic precancer at a Wednesday session focused on harnessing the stroma to prevent cancer initiation.
Learn more about HTAN at humantumoratlas.org.
The MC2 Center Community at AACR
Nearly 80 MC2 Center consortium members, representing all five consortia across almost every session type on the program. A few highlights:,
Mikala Egeblad (MetNet, Johns Hopkins) will chair and present at the stress & tumor microenvironment Major Symposium on April 20.
Shannon Mumenthaler (TEC, Ellison Institute) is a panelist at the non-clinical product safety in oncology symposium on April 19.
Valerie Weaver (PS-ON, UCSF) chairs and presents at the mechanobiology Major Symposium on April 22, joined by PS-ON's Dennis Discher (UPenn).
Trey Ideker (CSBC, UCSD) presents on drug resistance in ER+ breast cancer on April 20.
Peter Sorger (CCBIR, Harvard) will chair the Educational Session on 3D tissue imaging on April 18.
Around 30 more consortium members are presenting posters across the four poster days — tumor biology, spatial imaging, cancer evolution, AI in cancer care, and more. Don't miss Orion Banks presenting "The Cancer Complexity Knowledge Portal" (Poster 21) on April 20 at 2:00 PM.
Learn more about the MC2 Canter and the Cancer Complexity Knowledge Portal at cancercomplexity.synapse.org.
AACR Project GENIE
Sage Bionetworks has supported AACR Project GENIE as part of its coordinating center for more than a decade. GENIE has four dedicated sessions at this year's meeting:
The AACR Project GENIE Data Model: A Foundation for Scalable, Structured Data Collection to Support the Precision Oncology Revolution -- Methods Workshop, Friday April 18, 8:00 AM
AACR Project GENIE: Predictive Models and AI -- Poster Session, Sunday April 19, 2:00 PM
Advancing Cancer Research Through an International Cancer Registry: AACR Project GENIE Use Cases -- Minisymposium, Monday April 20, 2:30 PM
AACR Project GENIE: Genomic Characterization -- Poster Session, Tuesday April 21, 9:00 AM
Our Synapse poster is in the Sunday GENIE session (Posterboard 1), and our collaborator Ino de Bruijn (Memorial Sloan Kettering) presents the cBioPortal poster in Tuesday's GENIE session.
It’s going to be a good week in San Diego. We hope to see you there.
🚀 Learn more about Sage Bionetworks Cancer Research