Translational bioinformatics: coming of age

Abstract

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) recently augmented the scope of its activities to encompass translational bioinformatics as a third major domain of informatics. The AMIA has defined translational bioinformatics as "... the development of storage, analytic, and interpretive methods to optimize the transformation of increasingly voluminous biomedical data into proactive, predictive, preventative, and participatory health." In this perspective, I will list eight reasons why this is an excellent time to be studying translational bioinformatics, including the significant increase in funding opportunities available for informatics from the United States National Institutes of Health, and the explosion of publicly-available data sets of molecular measurements. I end with the significant challenges we face in building a community of future investigators in Translational Bioinformatics.

Figure 1

Bars represent the count per year of Request for Applications (RFAs) and Program Announcements (PAs) found through the NIH Advanced Funding Opportunities & Notices Search web-site containing the term “informatics”, either currently active or inactive. Line represents the fraction of this count over the total count of RFAs and PAs that year.