The Cancer Research Database (CRDB): Integrated Platform to Gain Statistical Insight Into the Correlation Between Cancer and COVID-19

Abstract

Background The advancement of cancer research has been facilitated through freely available cancer literature, databases, and tools. The age of genomics and big data has given rise to the need for cooperation and data sharing in order to make efficient use of this new information in the COVID-19 pandemic. Although there are many databases for cancer research, their access is not easy owing to different ways of processing and managing the data. There is an absence of a unified platform to manage all of them in a transparent and more comprehensible way. Objective In this study, an improved integrated cancer research database and platform is provided to facilitate a deeper statistical insight into the correlation between cancer and the COVID-19 pandemic, unifying the collection of almost all previous published cancer databases and defining a model web database for cancer research, and scoring databases on the basis of the variety types of cancer, sample size, completeness of omics results, and user interface. Methods Databases examined and integrated include the Data Portal database, Genomic database, Proteomic database, Expression database, Gene database, and Mutation database; and it is expected that this launch will sort, save, advance the understanding and encourage the use of these resources in the cancer research environment. Results To make it easy to search valuable information, 85 cancer databases are provided in the form of a table, and a database of databases named the Cancer Research Database (CRDB) has been built and presented herein. Furthermore, the CRDB has been herein equipped with unique navigation tools in order to be explored by three methods; that is, any single database can be browsed by typing the name in the given search bar, while all categories can be browsed by clicking on the name of the category or image expression icon, thus serving as a facility that could provide all the category databases on a single click. Conclusions The computational platform (PHP, HTML, CSS, and MySQL) used to build CRDB for the cancer scientific community can be freely investigated and browsed on the internet and is planned to be updated in a timely manner. In addition, based on the proposed platform, the status and diagnoses statistics of cancer during the COVID-19 pandemic have been thoroughly investigated herein using CRDB, thus providing an easy-to-manage, understandable framework that mines knowledge for future researchers.