Symposium: cBioPortal - Making cancer data accessible for all
11 nov. 2025 09:00 - 17:00

Personalised cancer medicine stands at the intersection of diagnosis, treatment, and outcome measurement. The real power of evidence-based oncology lies in uniting these three pillars into a continuous feedback loop, thereby creating the basis for a learning healthcare system. In such a system, real-time clinical, molecular, imaging, and pathology data are systematically captured, analysed, and fed back into clinical practice, enabling ever more precise and effective care.
The ability to reuse patient-level clinical, genomic, radiology, and digital pathology data at scale is not merely a technological aspiration – it is a necessity for accelerating cancer prevention, early detection, and treatment innovation. The data-integration platform ‘cBioPortal’ has emerged as a practical, widely adopted platform over its 15 years of existence, that can make this vision tangible for clinicians and researchers alike!
Now, in light of the ambitions of the European Health Data Space (EHDS) and the growing need for semantic interoperability across data infrastructures, we are pleased to announce a symposium devoted to cBioPortal. This symposium will bring together a range of perspectives about topics such as:
- Challenges and opportunities in the European cancer data research landscape
- Dutch user experiences with cBioPortal
- cBioPortal & common data models (for clinical, genomic, radiology and pathology data)
We would like to invite cBioPortal users and developers, as well as anyone interested in data integration, semantic interoperability, and FAIR data principles, to join us for this symposium, which will be hosted at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam.
Additionally, a live stream of the event will be shared, for those who would like to listen to the presentations but cannot travel to the location.
For an overview of the symposium in more detail, you can find the agenda below.
The symposium is free of charge, but registration is required. You can register via this link.
We hope to welcome you in Amsterdam on the 11th of November!
Programme
9:30-11:00 Opening Session
| 9:30 - 9:40 | Introduction to the symposium | Gerrit Meijer (NKI & Health-RI) |
| 9:40 - 10:15 | Challenges and opportunities in the European cancer data research landscape | Gerrit Meijer & Lifang Liu (Health-RI) |
| 10:15-11:00 | The cBioPortal for Cancer Genomics: Past, Present and Future | Niki Schultz & JJ Gao (MSK) |
11:00 - 11:30 Morning break
11:30-12:30 Session 1: Dutch user experiences with cBioPortal
| 11:30-11:45 | Pediatric hospital data for research | Sam de Vos (PMC) |
| 11:45-12:00 | Multicentre PLCRC ctDNA studies | Remond Fijneman (NKI) |
| 12:00-12:10 | Expanding patient search, real time, without borders? | Ruslan Forostianov/Guizela Huelsz Prince (SE4BIO) |
| 12:10-12:20 | Perspectives from the Dutch steering committee members of the cBioPortal DevOps community | Henk-Jan van den Ham (The Hyve) |
| 12:20-12:30 | Discussion panel – user needs | All |
12:30-13:30 Lunch
13:30 - 15:30 Session 2: Developments & common data models
| 13:30 - 13:50 | cBioPortal developments for Molecular Tumour Boards throughout Germany | Hauke Busch (University of Lübeck) |
| 13:50 - 14:10 | Oncology common data model | Melle Sieswerda (IKNL) |
| 14:10 - 14:30 | cBioPortal & radiology – perspective on interoperability | Stefan Klein (EMC) |
| 14:30 - 14:50 | cBioPortal & PALGA molecular diagnostic data | Wendy de Leng (UMCU) |
| 14:50 - 15:10 | cBioPortal & WGS – perspective on interoperability | Joep de Ligt (HMF) |
| 15:10 - 15:30 | General discussion time | All |
15:30 - 16:00 Afternoon break
16:00 - 17:00 Closing session
| 16:00 - 16:45 | cBioPortal development roadmap - interaction EU and US community | Ino de Bruijn (MSK) |
| 16:45 - 17:00 | Wrap up action points |
17:00 Networking drinks
Venue
The Netherlands Cancer Institute /Antoni van Leeuwenhoek
Plesmanlaan 121
1066 CX Amsterdam
The Netherlands
How to get there
Information how to reach the Institute and where to park, please visit route AVL
Contact details
If you have any questions or need any help, please send an e-mail to symposiumdesk@nki.nl


