Clinical trial results in context: comparison of baseline characteristics and outcomes of 38,510 RECOVERY trial participants versus a reference population of 346,271 people hospitalised with COVID-19 in England.

Background: Randomised trials are essential to reliably assess medical interventions. Nevertheless, interpretation of such studies, particularly when considering absolute effects, is enhanced by understanding how the trial population may differ from the populations it aims to represent.

Methods: We compared baseline characteristics and mortality of RECOVERY participants recruited in England (n = 38,510) with a reference population hospitalised with COVID-19 in England (n = 346,271) from March 2020 to November 2021.

Challenges and solutions to system-wide use of precision oncology as the standard of care paradigm.

The personalised oncology paradigm remains challenging to deliver despite technological advances in genomics-based identification of actionable variants combined with the increasing focus of drug development on these specific targets. To ensure we continue to build concerted momentum to improve outcomes across all cancer types, financial, technological and operational barriers need to be addressed. For example, complete integration and certification of the 'molecular tumour board' into 'standard of care' ensures a unified clinical decision pathway that both counteracts fragmentation and is the cornerstone of evidence-based delivery inside and outside of a research setting.

100,000 Genomes Pilot on Rare-Disease Diagnosis in Health Care - Preliminary Report.

Background: The U.K. 100,000 Genomes Project is in the process of investigating the role of genome sequencing in patients with undiagnosed rare diseases after usual care and the alignment of this research with health care implementation in the U.

National Institute for Health Research Health Informatics Collaborative: development of a pipeline to collate electronic clinical data for viral hepatitis research.

Objective: The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Informatics Collaborative (HIC) is a programme of infrastructure development across NIHR Biomedical Research Centres. The aim of the NIHR HIC is to improve the quality and availability of routinely collected data for collaborative, cross-centre research. This is demonstrated through research collaborations in selected therapeutic areas, one of which is viral hepatitis.

A metadata-aware application for remote scoring and exchange of tissue microarray images.

Background: The use of tissue microarrays (TMA) and advances in digital scanning microscopy has enabled the collection of thousands of tissue images. There is a need for software tools to annotate, query and share this data amongst researchers in different physical locations.

Results: We have developed an open source web-based application for remote scoring of TMA images, which exploits the value of Microsoft Silverlight Deep Zoom to provide a intuitive interface for zooming and panning around digital images.

A metadata approach for clinical data management in translational genomics studies in breast cancer.

Background: In molecular profiling studies of cancer patients, experimental and clinical data are combined in order to understand the clinical heterogeneity of the disease: clinical information for each subject needs to be linked to tumour samples, macromolecules extracted, and experimental results. This may involve the integration of clinical data sets from several different sources: these data sets may employ different data definitions and some may be incomplete.

Methods: In this work we employ semantic web techniques developed within the CancerGrid project, in particular the use of metadata elements and logic-based inference to annotate heterogeneous clinical information, integrate and query it.