SPARC

Overview

Study of a Prospective Research Cohort with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (SPARC-IBD or SPARC) is a multi-site project to create a longitudinally followed, well phenotyped cohort of patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) who have linked clinical data, self-reported outcome data, and biosamples that can be used for clinical and translational research that will lead to precision medicine strategies and new therapeutic targets that will improve the quality of life of patients with IBD. (Clinical data collection will continue indefinitely. Participants will be notified in the event that bio-sample and biopsy collection extends beyond 2026. The goal is to recruit 7000 patients into the study over all sites.)

The specific aims for the initial phase of the study are:

1. Create a prospective cohort of well phenotyped adult IBD patients with serial clinical and patient reported data and biosamples collected throughout the course of their diseases.
2. Identify predictors of response to IBD therapies from clinical, patient reported, genetic, genomic, transcriptomic, metabolomics, and microbiomic data.
3. Identify predictors of disease relapse among responders to therapies for IBD from clinical, patient reported, genetic, genomic, transcriptomic, metabolomics, and microbiomic data.

Whenever participants are scheduled to have a sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy as part of their usual care, they will be asked to provide us with a blood sample, a stool sample, and with extra biopsies of their intestines for research. We will ask they provide a stool specimen periodically throughout the course of the study, which will be picked up by courier at their home. Participants will be asked to complete quarterly electronic surveys about their health and health-related issues. Data will be collected from their medical record by use of the Epic Smart Form tool.

ICS' Role

ICS provides regularly scheduled updates of IBD patients in our EHR systems and generates a clinical dataset to submit to IBD Plexus, the data coordinating center, that's currently managed by Deloitte Consulting.

More Information

Please visit the FAQ page and agreements document for more project details.

Contacts

Internal

External

Project Management

Major Tasks & Initiatives

• Azure DevOps Platform Engineering Feature : 44118 : "Data Lake - SPARC Infrastructure Migration"

  • Phase 1 (COMPLETED) : Azure DevOps Platform Engineering User Story : 44863 : "Sparc Automation"

    The goal is to transition from using the Windows Server based transfer approach and perform the data generation, transfer, and archival to the Data Lake / Databricks platform.

  • Phase 2 (ongoing): Azure DevOps Platform Engineering User Story : 50725 : "SPARC: Production Setup"

    The goal is to create a databrick/databasin pipeline that will enable a regularly scheduled hands-off approach to submitting the data to the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation.

Important Dates & Notes

Important Deadlines

Currently None Scheduled

Deliverables

No specific deliverables yet

Meetings

Active discussions are done in the "SPARC-IBD" Microsoft teams chat. If needed, please contact Nicole to join the chat.

Administrative Details

Tracking Time

Please ensure all work is categorized underneath the following in Tracking Time:

IRB

Not Applicable

Digital Landmarks

Project Web Pages

• Crohn's & Colitis Foundation

Document Repositories

• Box: SPARC IBD (folder)
• Box: 30751 Deepak - SPARC IBD EMR Enhancement Project (folder)
• Box: 2953 SPARC IBD Plexus (folder)

Miscellaneous Meeting Notes

• 2024-10-02 Platform Engineering Meeting

InfoSec Report

Not Applicable

Code Repositories

• Azure DevOps: ics_sparc_automation.git (old windows server approach)
• Azure DevOps: sparch-automation (new databricks approach)

Technical Information

Guides, Tutorials, & References

• Guides ❯ Project FAQs
• Guides ❯ Data Generation & Transfer Processes
• Guides ❯ Archival Processes

Team Specific Documentation

• RDC Pages
• Data Broker Pages

Glossary / Acronyms