NCI GDC MCP Server gives an AI assistant access to harmonized genomic and clinical cancer data from the National Cancer Institute's Genomic Data Commons (GDC), letting researchers explore projects, cases, and data schemas in natural language instead of writing GDC API queries.

Use it when you want to explore cancer research data conversationally - listing projects related to a cancer type, discovering what fields are available for a data type like "cases," counting cases matching a criterion, or inspecting the schema for a GDC type like "Project." It requires no programming knowledge and connects to a hosted, ready-to-use server. Do not use it for data outside the GDC's scope, and note the licensing terms: it's MIT-licensed, but academic and research publications using this tool are asked to provide appropriate attribution - commercial use follows standard MIT terms without that citation requirement.

• Answer natural-language questions about cancer genomics data.
• Explore available data types and fields in the GDC database.
• Provide summaries, counts, and basic data analysis.
• Access harmonized genomic and clinical cancer data for research.

Example queries: "Show me all projects related to kidney cancer," "What fields are available for cases?," "List all available data types in GDC," "How many breast cancer cases are there?," "Show me the schema for the 'Project' type."

Connect to the hosted server directly - no local deployment needed:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nci-gdc": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["mcp-remote", "https://nci-gdc-mcp-server.quentincody.workers.dev/mcp"]
    }
  }
}

An SSE transport variant is also available at https://nci-gdc-mcp-server.quentincody.workers.dev/sse. For local development, point mcp-remote at http://localhost:8787/mcp instead.

Cancer researchers, bioinformaticians, and students who want to explore GDC genomic and clinical data conversationally without writing GDC API queries or scripts.