The Caisis Research Data System

CAISIS is a research data system that was started to support predictive model development in urologic oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and has become widely adopted across different departments and institutions to manage biomedical research data for a variety of diseases, mostly cancers. It was developed using ASP.NET/C# and Microsoft SQL Server, and is freely distributed under the GPL open-source license. This system complements both clinical systems and clinical data repositories, and its functionality has been extended recently to manage biorepositories and prospective clinical trials. The database structure is organized temporally and around patients rather than around protocols or individual projects, which allows it to be extended to manage data for multiple diseases and medical specialties.