caNanoLab: A nanomaterial data repository for biomedical research

The application of nanotechnology to medicine enables the development of research tools, and multifunctional diagnostic and therapeutic agents with the potential to greatly improve the clinical care of patients. Although still an emerging field, nanoinformatics seeks to identify information relevant to nanotechnology research that can be used in knowledge discovery, and in the case of biomedicine, facilitate the advancement of these technologies and tools to the clinical environment through data collection, sharing, validation, and analysis. In this paper, we describe the cancer Nanotechnology Laboratory (caNanoLab) data portal, a public repository for the storage and sharing of well-characterized biomedical nanomaterial data and information, including experimental conditions. caNanoLab also provides access to publications and protocols associated with nanomaterials.