Global Health, a subsidiary of software group Working Systems Solutions (ASX:WSS) has launched an online breast cancer database for the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne. Sites across every state in Australia and New Zealand are now linked to provide one of the world's largest resources for investigating familial breast cancer.

The database was commissioned by the Kathleen Cuningham Foundation Consortium for research into familial breast cancer (kConFab) and is an enormous collection of information about families across Australia and New Zealand with a history of breast cancer. It aims to make data and bio-specimens available to researchers around the world who are investigating familial aspects of breast and breast/ovarian cancer.

Project Manager at kConFab, Eveline Niedermayr, said going online has made a huge difference.

“I’m excited about this because it is so user friendly. It is the same for all the research nurses. They report how easy it is. Now we can instantly verify information. The new system saves us time and is very accurate. The old way was not always so,” Niedermayr said.

In 1997 kConFab began enrolling families with a strong history of breast or ovarian cancer. After five years of gathering data, and with nearly 40 research projects using the information, it became evident it was time to put the data online. Global Health’s professional services team won the contract to produce a new web database.

Vikas David, solution aArchitect and project manager for Global Health Professional Services, said the kConFab project had to be designed and built from the ground up.

“Creating an online database that could cope with a large amount of data and be easy to update and use was a challenge,” he said. “However we were able to provide a solution that enabled the information to be shared across multiple locations and be instantly accessible at the point of need. Supporting such important research into the causes of breast cancer was also very rewarding.”