Nanoinformatics: new challenges for biomedical informatics at the nano level

Abstract

Over the last decades Nanotechnology has promised to advance science and technology in many areas. Within medicine, Nanomedicine promises to deliver new methods for diagnosis, prognosis and therapy. As the amount of available information is rapidly growing, new Biomedical Informatics approaches have to be developed to satisfy the increasing demand on data and knowledge management. In 2007, a new sub-discipline, already named "Nanoinformatics", was created with support from the US National Science Foundation. In Europe, a project named ACTION-Grid was launched in 2008 with support from the European Commission to analyze the challenges and agenda for developing Nanoinformatics as a discipline related to Nanotechnology, Biomedicine and Informatics. For MIE 2009, members of this consortium proposed a workshop to discuss the scientific and strategic issues associated with this topic. Nanoinformatics aims to create a bridge between Nanomedicine and Information Technology applying computational methods to manage the information created in the nanomedical domain.