The goal of the National Center for Biomedical Informatics is to integrate genomic and molecular biology information into disease or biological models to enhance NIH-funded research projects associated with it. As more disease models are added to NCIBI, the Center expects interlinked processes between diseases to be identified. The knowledge gained by each disease will be moved into an underlying repository of information, which will be continually updated with new information from databases around the world. This repository will continually calculate relationships between molecular information, in the background, and will notify an NIH researcher working on Driving Biological Problems when new information pertinent to their problem is created.

Some highlights of the activities to be undertaken at the NCIBI are listed below:

• The NCIBI will model normal and disease relevant molecular interactions with templates, and automatically extract instances of these interactions out of the biomedical literature using natural language processing.

• The NCIBI will track the context of molecular information in the biomedical literature and databases through the integration of ontology and annotation information. NCIBI will collaborate on this task with the National Center for Biomedical Ontology at Stanford University.

• The NCIBI will utilize novel techniques it is developing for rapid biomedical data mining using large-scale computing and database technologies, information integration, bioinformatics algorithms, and molecular pathway/network algorithms—all applied to NIH-funded driving biological problems. These methods will allow modeling of, and very fast searches through, the complex information of molecular interactions present in the normal and diseased states.

• NCIBI data sources will include de-identified experimental data and data from national and international databases with provenance to the original sources attached. Provenance will be tracked through the information integration process.

• The NCIBI will utilize Artificial Intelligence (AI) learning about user interactions with the system, automated workflow development, and suggestions for novice users.

• The NCIBI will utilize a highly flexible computing approach that allows development and testing of a variety of software architectures for best disease modeling, information integration, learning methodologies, and large scale computing.

• The NCIBI will develop modeling environments specific to a disease, and will also include a full spectrum of biological information that is made available to the environment. The underlying biological information is increased as each new disease model is developed.

• The NCIBI will perform evaluative studies of collaboration in the analysis of complex systems. This will help to determine the best data visualization and collaboration methods, when the complexity of a disease is such that one investigator, alone, may not be able to understand it.

• The NCIBI will help the NIH research investigator explore the best methods to hypothesize and test models in complex systems related to the normal and disease states.

The NCIBI brings together a truly multidisciplinary team including widely recognized experts. It leadership team includes NCIBI principal investigator and senior scientific director Brian D. Athey, Ph.D., who is supported by 3 additional senior scientific directors: David J. States, M.D., Ph.D.; Gilbert S. Omenn, M.D. Ph.D.; and H.V. Jagadish, PhD.; A. Chrystine Bliton, M.S. is the NCIBI Project Manager Dr. Karen Skinner, of the National Institute on Drug Abuse is the NIH NCIBI Program Officer and Dr. Donald P. Jenkins, of the National Library of Medicine is the NIH NCIBI Lead Scientific Officer.

Bioinformatics - Dr. David J. States and Dr. Brian D. Athey, U-M, Ann Arbor, MI; Dr. Peter Karp, SRI, Palo Alto CA; Dr. Jill Mesirov, Broad Institute, Cambridge, MA

Proteomics - Dr. Gilbert S. Omenn, U-M, Ann Arbor, MI; Dr. Chris Hogue, Blueprint, Toronto, CA

Systems Biology - Dr. Arul Chinnaiyan and Dr. Peter Woolf, U-M, Ann Arbor, MI; Dr. Leroy Hood, ISB Seattle, WA;

Genetics of Complex Diseases - Dr. Michael Boehnke, Dr. Melvin McInnis, and Dr. Eva Feldman, U-M, Ann Arbor, MI

Computational Architecture – Dr. Thomas Finholt, U-M, Ann Arbor MI; Dr. Kirstie Bellman and Dr. Christopher Landauer, The Aerospace Corp., Marina del Rey, CA; Dr. Bruce Shatz, University of Illinois-Champagne-Urban, IL.

Database Technology - Dr. H.V. Jagadish and Dr. Jignesh Patel, U-M, Ann Arbor, MI

Ontologies and Natural Language Processing - Dr. Mark Musen and Dr. Natasha Noy, Stanford, CA; Dr. Dragomir Radev and Dr. Steven Abney, U-M, Ann Arbor, MI

Human Computer Interfaces and User Evaluation - Dr. Mark Ackerman and Dr. Barbara Mirel, U-M, Ann Arbor, MI; Dr. Lynn Johnson,

Machine Learning - Satinder Singh, UM, Ann Arbor, MI

Computational Anatomy - Dr. Brian Athey, UM, Ann Arbor, MI and Dr. Fred Bookstein, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

Image Analysis - Dr. Robert Murphy, CMU, Pittsburgh, PA

Other NIH-funded National Centers for Biomedical Computing:

• Physics-Based Simulation of Biological Structures Center (Russ Altman, M.D., Ph.D., and Scott Delp, Ph.D., of Stanford University in California )

• National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (Ron Kikinis, M.D., Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts )

• Center for Computational Biology (Arthur Toga, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles )

• Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside Center (Isaac Kohane, M.D., Ph.D., Brigham and Women's Hospital and Children's Hospital, and John Glaser, Ph.D., Vice President and CIO at Partners HealthCare System

• National Center for Multi-Scale Study of Cellular Networks (Andrea Califano, Ph.D., Columbia University in the City of New York )

• National Center for Biomedical Ontology (Mark A. Musen, M.D., Ph.D., Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA )

NIH resources:

Press release and backgrounder: www.nigms.nih.gov/news/ncbc.html and www.nih.gov/news/pr/sep2005/roadmapbackgrounders.pdf

National Centers for Biomedical Computing: www.bisti.nih.gov/ncbc/index.cfm

Roadmap/ Bioinformatics and Computational Biology: nihroadmap.nih.gov/bioinformatics/

National Institute of General Medical Sciences : www.nigms.nih.gov/

National Institute on Drug Abuse: www.nida.nih.gov/

National Library of Medicine: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/

UMHS: press release:

University of Michigan researchers receive $18.7-million NIH grant to create a National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics

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