A team of researchers is making news for their groundbreaking research on T-cell therapies. The research team inserted a gene mutation found in certain lymphomas, called CARD11–PIK3R3, into therapeutic T cells. The mutation makes the T cells more efficient at treating solid tumors — without turning those cells cancerous.
The team published their findings in Nature in February, and the paper has been accessed nearly 50,000 times and appeared in over 30 news outlets, according to the journal. Jaehyuk Choi, M.D., Ph.D., who co-led the study, appeared on Nature’s podcast to discuss the findings.
“None of these preclinical models predicts exactly what happens in patients,” Dr. Choi said on the podcast. “But I think that we're potentially opening up new paradigms to think about, how do we control [T-cell] functions biochemically and genetically with our data.”
Members of the research team are funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), and National Cancer Institute (NCI).
An example of impactful data sharing
NIAID data scientist Sydney Foote, M.P.H., also recognizes the paper as an example of data sharing. The research team’s raw sequence reads are available in the National Center for Biotechnology Information Sequence Read Archive (BioProject ID PRJNA1029944).
Sharing scientific data can lead to reuse and reanalysis and ultimately to new discoveries, says Foote.
“[Reusing shared data] can not only reduce the cost of research, but also accelerate the timelines [for new findings],” she says. “And that's the hope for the future: that we can have high-quality, interoperable data available so secondary research projects can produce significant findings on accelerated timelines with smaller budgets.”
While Dr. Choi’s research is potentially opening new paradigms in cancer treatment, Foote is part of a paradigm shift in data sharing and accessibility. In the past, data sharing might have been viewed with skepticism, Foote explains: Researchers didn’t want to get “scooped” and felt protective of their scientific data.
But she says that has started to change. One contributing factor is that many scientific journals now require researchers to share research data. NIH is also helping to spur that change through its Data Management and Sharing (DMS) Policy, which went into effect in January 2023.
Foote points out that the DMS Policy encourages researchers to share all their scientific data — including data that is not associated with their published results: “Say [researchers] sequence 100 human genomes, and they release a publication where they analyzed only 30 of those sequences. The policy is encouraging sharing all 100 sequences, so if someone wants to reproduce the research, they have all the data that was available at the beginning of the research project, or they can reuse the data for new research questions.”
Facilitating data sharing at NIAID
Part of Foote’s role is helping NIAID researchers navigate the DMS Policy. She hosts data sharing webinars for NIAID staff, coordinates with data sharing points of contact in each NIAID division, and helps researchers register data into, and access data from, dbGaP, the database of Genotypes and Phenotypes. (Incidentally, Dr. Choi and his group have shared past research data on dbGaP, which contains genomic data from human research).
NIAID researchers can find more information on navigating the DMS Policy on the Data Policy and Guidance page.
“I'm hoping that with the DMS Policy and the general encouragement towards more open access science, researchers will accept that sharing data more broadly and earlier in their research projects is more helpful and valuable to the scientific community than it is risky,” Foote says.
Dr. Kole Roybal, Ph.D., the other co-leader of the T-cell study, is quoted in an article published on the NCI website that he believes there is more to be gleaned from the group’s research data.
“Maybe the [CARD11–PIK3R3] fusion protein will be good for [fighting] some subset of solid cancers. And one of the other [mutations] we found will be important for another subset,” he said. “This is the beginning [of this research], not the end.”