ANN ARBOR ? The University of Michigan Medical School has received an $18.7-million grant from the National Institutes of Health to create a new National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics, one of seven National Centers funded by the NIH, and the only one not in California or the Northeast.
?The NCIBI award positions the University of Michigan and its partners at the center of the NIH Roadmap?s vision for a national networked computational infrastructure for biomedical computing,? says Brian D. Athey, Ph.D., the grant?s principal investigator, and director, Michigan Center for Biological Information, and associate professor, Department of Psychiatry. ?It is an honor for the NCIBI to be entrusted by the NIH with the opportunity to provide such great potential to help accelerate biomedical research discoveries and potential treatments.?
The NCIBI will develop a framework of conceptual models, computational infrastructure and integrated knowledge repository that modern scientists need in order to make effective use of the wealth of data flowing from molecular biology and translational research. Through research and development that focuses on biomedical information integration, the NCIBI will help maximize the impact of computational technology developed in the Center and facilitate the work of many NIH-supported scientists nationally.The NCIBI is expected to be operational for at least 10 years.
The $18.7-million grant is part of a cooperative agreement between the University of Michigan and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, which has programmatic oversight of the National Centers for Biomedical Computing, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the National Library of Medicine.
Ultimately, the goal of the NCIBI is to improve people?s health. By examining large-scale molecular information about a disease, scientists make discoveries about basic disease mechanisms that can help in designing further laboratory and clinical studies. These discoveries can advance disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment in a number of ways. For instance, discovering particular genes or gene variants that are involved in a disease can lead to tests to identify people at higher risk for developing a disease, or the discovery of new drug treatments to stop the disease process. The NCIBI will contribute more rapidly to such outcomes through its large-scale integration and pre-computed data analysis of genomic and molecular biology information.
“The National Centers for Biomedical Computing initiative ? part of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research ? is a major commitment by NIH to provide powerful computational tools for the biomedical community,” says Dr. John Whitmarsh, project leader for the National Centers for Biomedical Computing initiative. ?The National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics is one of three centers funded in 2005 that, together with four centers funded last year, will network to create user-friendly software and computational infrastructure to advance biomedical and clinical research. Under the direction of Dr. Athey, the University of Michigan Center has assembled an interdisciplinary team focused on the critical need for integrating diverse biological and medical data sets.?
The NCIBI will start work on four driving biological problems ? prostate cancer, bipolar depression, diabetes type I and diabetes type II. Researchers need new tools to understand the genetic, metabolic and clinical heterogeneity of these diseases. In order to mine and assimilate the wide range of available data and text information, investigators need sophisticated, yet user-friendly, computational means to generate insightful models of disease processes. NCIBI will create, test and deploy these tools for use by NIH researchers nationwide.
The State of Michigan-funded Michigan Center for Biological Information, part of the Michigan Technology Tri-Corridor Core Technology Alliance, has provided essential support for the research and development work necessary to launch the National Center. The CTA is a publicly-funded collaborative network of advanced technology facilities in genomics, proteomics, protein structure, and informatics serving Michigan researchers affiliated with universities, private research institutes, and biotechnology or pharmaceutical firms, as well as clients outside the State of Michigan. MCBI?s goals are to help advance biological research and technology and create jobs in research and industry in Michigan through promotion of bioinformatics.
