An infrastructure for interconnecting research institutions

Abstract

Many researchers believe that personalized medicine is a potential solution to the well-known challenges facing the pharmaceutical industry worldwide today. Achieving the full promise of personalized medicine requires a new systems approach to biomedicine that will only be enabled by novel, interoperable IT infrastructures that facilitate simpler data access, data sharing, and enhanced collaboration. This article will describe how the technology developed in the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) program (http://cabig.cancer.gov/) from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) is already enabling many research organizations to implement personalized medicine approaches for their basic and clinical research programs.

Figure 1 -. Standards:

The use of accepted industry standards such as BRIDG, and interoperable software applications such as the CTS suite or Firebird, enables the traditionally isolated data silos of Healthcare, Regulatory, and Clinical Care to exchange data in support of collaborative research.

Figure 2 -. caGrid:

caGrid provides an interoperable grid infrastructure that supports the specific needs of research organizations by supplying metadata support, security services, web-based applications, and connectivity with client-side and community-provided applications and services facilitating efficient research workflows and collaborative research.

Figure 3 -. caTissue:

caTissue is one of more than 40 end-user applications developed as part of the caBIG^® program that supports scientific workflows for biomedical researchers. caTissue provides support for biospecimen acquisition, annotation, query and sample requests by researchers looking for samples to support their research needs.