The Somatic Mutation Calling Challenge was launched today by the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) and the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), in collaboration with Sage Bionetworks and IBM’s DREAM. The goal of the SMC Challenge is to find accurate methods to identify cancer-associated mutations from whole-genome sequencing data.

Like previous DREAM Challenges, this new Challenge will engage a diverse community of scientists to solve a specific problem in a given time period by placing scientific data, tools, scoreboards and the resulting predictive models into an open Commons.

To address this need, the Challenge will post the raw DNA sequencing data of 10 human tumor-normal pairs (5 prostate, 5 pancreatic), comprising approximately 9 terabytes of data to a high-speed distribution server. Contestants will have 6 months to optimize their predictive models. After the Challenge closes in July, 2014, at least 5,000 DNA candidate mutations predicted by different participating teams will be prospectively validated on an independent sequencing platform by the Challenge organizers. The accuracy of participants’ predictions will be ranked using the newly generated validation data based on sensitivity, specificity and balanced accuracy amongst other metrics.

To participate in the Challenge, individuals will need to register at https://www.synapse.org/ #!Challenges:DREAM. In addition, they must be approved by OICR’s ICGC Data Access Compliance Office to access the data.

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