NIH Provides $32.8 Million to Enhance Biomedical Informatics Research Network

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http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=17530

NIH Provides $32.8 Million to Enhance Biomedical Informatics Research Network

09 Dec 2004

The National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a component of the National

Institutes of Health (NIH), announced today it will provide $32.8 million in

additional funding to enhance its Biomedical Informatics Research Network

(BIRN). The University of California San Diego Medical School will receive $18.8

million over five years, while Massachusetts General Hospital will be granted

nearly $14 million for three years of support. BIRN is an NIH initiative

involving a consortium of 15 universities and 22 research groups that fosters

collaborations in biomedical science by utilizing information technology

innovations. BIRN's initial three test bed projects focus on brain imaging of

human neurological disorders and associated animal models.

" Information technology offers tremendous potential to advance our ability to

diagnose and treat disease, " said NCRR Director Judith L. Vaitukaitis, M.D.

" BIRN's powerful and flexible approaches to data integration are designed to

accommodate the dynamic nature of scientific inquiry and to allow novel

discoveries that incorporate knowledge across scale and even across species.

With this additional investment in the BIRN consortium, we hope to provide

researchers with networked analytical tools that will greatly advance our

knowledge of neurological disorders such as depression, schizophrenia, and

Alzheimer's disease. "

BIRN's charter is to create an environment encouraging biomedical scientists and

clinical researchers to make new discoveries by facilitating sharing, analysis,

visualization, and data comparisons across laboratories. A central premise of

the BIRN cyberinfrastructure is that the physical location of data and resources

should not hamper a research study. BIRN's data integration framework builds on

the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, supported by

the National Science Federation.

BIRN consists of four parts:

-- The Function BIRN is working to understand the underlying causes of

schizophrenia and to develop new treatments for the disease. The goal is to

determine the role of frontal and temporal lobe dysfunction in schizophrenia,

and to assess the impact of treatments on functional brain abnormalities.

-- The Brain Morphometry BIRN is investigating whether brain structural

differences correlate to symptoms such as memory dysfunction or depression and

whether specific structural differences distinguish diagnostic categories.

-- The Mouse BIRN is examining animal models of multiple sclerosis,

schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, ADHD (Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity

Disorder), Tourette's Syndrome and brain cancer. Researchers are studying animal

models of disease at different anatomical scales to test hypotheses associated

with human neurological disorders.

-- The BIRN Coordinating Center (BIRN-CC) develops, implements, and supports the

information technology infrastructure necessary to achieve distributed

collaborations and data sharing among the test bed participants.

Although all three test beds involve some aspect of neuroimaging, the problems

that they are addressing are common throughout biomedical research and the

solutions will be applicable outside the individual fields represented in the

test beds. For example, BIRN is using these initial test bed studies to drive

the construction and daily use of a federated data sharing environment that

presents biological data held at geographically separate sites as a single,

unified database. To this end, the BIRN program is rapidly producing tools and

technologies that enable the aggregation of data from virtually any laboratory's

research program to the BIRN data federation system, independent of the

biological problem being addressed.

Lessons learned and best practices are continuously collected and made available

to help new collaborative efforts make efficient use of this infrastructure at

an increasingly rapid pace. These tools and best practices are intended to

maximize the extent to which the infrastructure being developed can quickly be

deployed to support the greater biomedical research community.

More information about BIRN is available at http://www.nbirn.net.

NCRR is part of the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the Department

of Health and Human Services. NCRR is the nation's leading federal sponsor of

resources that enable advances in many areas of biomedical research. NCRR

support provides the scientific research community with access to a diverse

array of biomedical research technologies, instrumentation, specialized basic

and clinical research facilities, animal models, genetic stocks, and such

biomaterials as cell lines, tissues, and organs. Additional information about

NCRR can be found at http://www.ncrr.nih.gov.