Johns Hopkins Launches Open Source Cancer Database

New database structure allows researchers to more easily study multiple types of cancer data in one setting.

Published on Mar. 5, 2026

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Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and The Johns Hopkins University have created a novel database structure called AstroID that organizes clinical, laboratory, genetic sequencing, and imaging data for cancer patients in a way that allows investigators anywhere to more easily study multiple types of cancer data in one setting. The structure, built in a commercial web-based application called REDCap, can be scaled to accommodate thousands of patients and billions of cancer cells.

Why it matters

Typically, cancer research has been hampered by the difficulty of compiling and linking diverse data sources about individual patients. AstroID aims to streamline this process, enabling researchers to more efficiently conduct studies across larger patient cohorts and multiple tumor types.

The details

AstroID organizes data in six tiers, including information about the patient, diagnosis, clinical events, specimens, and how those specimens are processed in the lab. This structure allows researchers to ask questions across all the data that has been gathered, combining it in the context of the longitudinal patient experience. Previously, it was painstaking for researchers to manually enter data, so cancer studies were often limited to relatively small cohorts. AstroID is designed to scale out to handle studies of hundreds or thousands of patients.

  • The AstroID structure was published on December 25, 2025 in the Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer.
  • Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have now deployed this structure in their laboratories for 16 different patient groups with multiple tumor types.

The players

Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center

A cancer research and treatment center at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

The Johns Hopkins University

The university that collaborated with the Kimmel Cancer Center on developing the AstroID database structure.

Janis M. Taube, M.D.

Director of the Division of Dermatopathology and co-director of the Tumor Microenvironment Laboratory at the Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

Alexander Szalay, Ph.D.

Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and professor in the Department of Computer Science at The Johns Hopkins University, as well as the director of the Institute for Data Intensive Science at Johns Hopkins.

Elizabeth Will

A postdoctoral student who helped develop the AstroID structure.

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What they’re saying

“What this structure does is allow me to ask questions across all of this data that's already been gathered, and across tumor types, and combine it all together in the context of the longitudinal patient experience.”

— Janis M. Taube, M.D., Director of the Division of Dermatopathology and co-director of the Tumor Microenvironment Laboratory at the Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer)

“What we are trying to do is to scale out so we can handle patients on the order of hundreds or thousands of patients in a study.”

— Alexander Szalay, Ph.D., Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and professor in the Department of Computer Science at The Johns Hopkins University, and director of the Institute for Data Intensive Science at Johns Hopkins (Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer)

What’s next

The AstroID structure is now publicly available on GitHub for any researcher to use, and the Johns Hopkins team plans to continue expanding its use for cancer studies as well as potentially adapting it for other disease processes.

The takeaway

AstroID represents a significant advance in cancer research by enabling more efficient and comprehensive data integration and analysis across large patient cohorts, which could accelerate the discovery of new biomarkers and therapeutic targets.