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Wednesday, April 26, 2000

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BioInform $12.8M in NIH Grants Fund Work on Pharmacogenetics Database, Tools
"The US National Institutes of Health awarded $12.8 million to investigators at nine projects that will contribute to the creation of a public pharmacogenetics database. The tool could become available for public use within one year.

The bulk of the money will fund research that will generate the content of the database--information on drug responses in specific patient categories. But three investigators were awarded grants to create and apply bioinformatics tools that will make the data accessible.

Russ Altman of Stanford University was awarded $1.6 million to operate the Stanford Pharmacogenetics Knowledge Base (PharmGKB). NIH will give $421,000 to Yale University medical informatics professor Prakash Nadkarni to design web-based tools for incorporating existing pharmacogenetics knowledge into that database. And Richard Weinshilboum at the Mayo Foundation in Rochester, Minn., will use a $576,000 award to search for variations in genes encoding proteins already known to be important in the body's handling of an array of medicines, hormones, and chemical messengers."

"For the pharmacogenetics network, Nadkarni has proposed using the National Library of Medicine's Unified Medical Language System to design a "smarter" database search tool that scans text not just for matching phrases, but also for words with similar meanings. He explained, "Simple word indexing doesn't consult a thesaurus, but as it happens, there is a humongous thesaurus of all medical terms and quite a lot of bioinformatics terms in the Unified Medical Language System."

redux [03.30.00]
JAMIA Integration and Beyond: Linking Information from Disparate Sources and into Workflow
"The vision of integrating information—from a variety of sources, into the way people work, to improve decisions and process—is one of the cornerstones of biomedical informatics. Thoughts on how this vision might be realized have evolved as improvements in information and communication technologies, together with discoveries in biomedical informatics, and have changed the art of the possible. This review identified three distinct generations of "integration" projects. First-generation projects create a database and use it for multiple purposes. Second-generation projects integrate by bringing information from various sources together through enterprise information architecture. Third-generation projects inter-relate disparate but accessible information sources to provide the appearance of integration. The review suggests that the ideas developed in the earlier generations have not been supplanted by ideas from subsequent generations. Instead, the ideas represent a continuum of progress along the three dimensions of workflow, structure, and extraction. "

JAMIA Integration and Beyond: Panel Discussion
"I think one of the toughest things we all have to deal with is updating our dictionaries. In the simplest cases, the name of an organism is changed and we just have to do the maintenance. It is tougher, when, as with Citrobacter, they do genetic studies and say, "Oh, it's really six different organisms, not one." We have the human genome project coming very quickly. Even that is just the tip of the iceberg. We're not only going to see all the genes; we're then going to see clinical tests based on gene expression. Essentially, you'll be able to look at something on the order of 180,000 gene products and whether they're up or down regulated. How are we going to integrate such an incredible amount of data at a time when we're going to also be changing how we think about these processes? Classification and simple mapping are not going to work, because the lumpers and splitters are going to be arguing furiously on a daily basis."



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Bioinformatics will be at the core of biology in the 21st century. In fields ranging from structural biology to genomics to biomedical imaging, ready access to data and analytical tools are fundamentally changing the way investigators in the life sciences conduct research and approach problems. Complex, computationally intensive biological problems are now being addressed and promise to significantly advance our understanding of biology and medicine. No biological discipline will be unaffected by these technological breakthroughs.

BIOINFORMATICS IN THE 21st CENTURY

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