IU Manifold case study

Launched in November 2024, the cancer center’s Biospecimen Collection and Banking Core (BC²) built a comprehensive data platform for the center’s research community. The Manifold platform has already reduced the time to service complex data and sample research requests from weeks to minutes.

Additional early wins include:

• Five data sources and 70 terabytes of data brought into a centralized system, improving searchability and accessibility
• Gives analysts and researchers full visibility into data from 27,000 patients and more than 80,000 samples

With real-time visibility into biobank inventory—including biospecimens, pre-indexed clinical data, genomic sequencing results, variant calls, and annotations—researchers can quickly determine what data and samples are available to address their questions, eliminating the inefficiencies of fragmented systems.

“Advancements like this are transformative because they remove the technical and logistical barriers that have historically slowed cancer research,” Anna Maria Storniolo, MD, medical director of BC², said. “By making complex data usable and accessible, we empower more researchers to ask bold questions and accelerate discoveries that directly impact patient lives.”

The BC² team is seeing measurable benefits in supporting the researchers they collaborate with regularly. The team frequently receives complex data requests that once took weeks to fulfill.

For example, a recent request sought “to identify tissue samples harboring a combination of KEAP, KRAS and/or STK11 mutations from patients with lung adenocarcinoma who had not yet received chemotherapy at the time of sample acquisition.” Previously, fulfilling such a specific request required manually reviewing hundreds of patient charts.

“As precision medicine advances, we need to understand key aspects of other domains,” Emily Nelson, data and regulatory team manager and ORIEN program manager at the cancer center, said. “Before, finding how many samples matched specific criteria—like age, cancer biology, genomic markers, and treatment type—could take days or even a week. Now, with this technology, we get answers in minutes.”

If you’re interested in getting access to the platform, reach out to Jill Henry (jihenry@iu.edu) for more details.

This story is written with excerpts from a case study about the cancer center’s Manifold platform implementation.

Read the full case study