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Faculty Receive Funding for Two National Biomedical Computing Centers
In an effort to speed the benefits of biomedical computing from bench to bedside, the National Institutes of Health has funded four new National Centers for Biomedical Computing, two of which have been awarded to HMS faculty members Isaac Kohane and Ron Kikinis. The centers, part of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, will develop and implement the core of a universal computing infrastructure in biomedical research.
HMS's Isaac Kohane (left) and Ron Kikinis have each been awarded $20 million from the NIH to speed the benefits of biomedical computing. (Kohane photo by Leah Gourley; Kikinis photo courtesy of Ron Kikinis)
Kohane, the Lawrence J. Henderson associate professor of pediatrics and health sciences and technology at Children's Hospital Boston, and coprincipal investigator John Glaser, chief information officer and vice president of information systems at Partners HealthCare System, will lead a new center called Informatics for Integrating Biology and Bedside, dubbed "I2B2." The $20 million, five-year project is designed to enable physicians to translate relevant findings into therapies for human health.
"We believe that a project like I2B2 may lead to the next generation of medical breakthroughs and discovery," Kohane said. "We will finally have a way to blend huge volumes of clinical research and phenotypic data with genomic research data and apply that knowledge to patients."
The I2B2 center will test its developments on diabetes mellitus, asthma and airway diseases, hypertension, and Huntington's disease. The center will collaborate with Brigham and Women's Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Children's, HMS, the Harvard-Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics, HSPH, HSDM, Harvard University, and MIT. In addition, the project is planning an outreach program to help eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care by disseminating new informatics tools and methods to underserved communities.
The other grant was awarded to Ron Kikinis, professor of radiology at BWH, and coprincipal investigator Stephen Wong, HMS associate professor of radiology at BWH, to establish the National Alliance for Medical Imaging and Computing Center. The center will lead a multi-institutional effort to develop software that integrates analysis and imaging data from different sources, including MRI scans, to better understand a range of human diseases. The five-year, $20 million grant aims to make analytical and computational resources that can process and translate imaging data relevant to clinical practice.
"Our vision is to equip researchers to use the power of modern imaging machines to characterize diseases, find them faster, and examine new treatment methods," said Kikinis, who is also director of the Surgical Planning Laboratory at BWH.
He and Wong will work on developing, integrating, and deploying computer systems that can be easily used, accessed, and shared. The researchers will develop computational tools for the analysis and visualization of medical imaging data to enable examination of basic neuroscience and neurological disorders, initially focusing on schizophrenia.
Collaborating institutions include HMS, MGH, MIT, Dartmouth Medical School, General Electric Global Research, Kitware, Inc., Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Utah, and the University of California.