TCGA2STAT: simple TCGA data access for integrated statistical analysis in R

Motivation: Massive amounts of high-throughput genomics data profiled from tumor samples were made publicly available by the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Results: We have developed an open source software package, TCGA2STAT, to obtain the TCGA data, wrangle it, and pre-process it into a format ready for multivariate and integrated statistical analysis in the R environment. In a user-friendly format with one single function call, our package downloads and fully processes the desired TCGA data to be seamlessly integrated into a computational analysis pipeline. No further technical or biological knowledge is needed to utilize our software, thus making TCGA data easily accessible to data scientists without specific domain knowledge.