Abstract
Florida ranks second in cancer burden in the United States. The Florida CAncer RESearch (FL CARES) Network (https://floridacancernetwork.org/) is a statewide collaboration dedicated to advancing cancer research and improving patient outcomes through education, collaborative research initiatives, and a focus on reducing health disparities by leveraging advanced computational approaches. Funded by the State of Florida Bankhead-Coley Cancer Research Program, FL CARES comprises six research organizations, including Florida's three NCI-designated Cancer Centers. The Network has established a collaborative research consortium with unified policies, coordinated data and metadata standards, and diverse datasets. It incorporates tools like SCAN360, developed at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, to explore the impact of social determinants of health and environmental factors on cancer outcomes across Florida communities. To further collaborative computational research, FL CARES is developing the Platform for Accelerating Collaborative Computational Cancer Research (PAC3R). This advanced informatics system enables FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data management, including standardization, harmonization, and integration of multimodal cancer datasets. PAC3R facilitates secure data sharing, scalable bioinformatics tools’ deployment, and collaborative analyses across the Network. Built on the Sylvester Data Portal (https://sdp.miami.edu/), a cloud-based multi-omics platform managing clinicogenomic and research data, PAC3R integrates diverse datasets such as transcriptional perturbation signatures, cell sensitivity data, small molecule interactions, and large-scale genomics from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC).