October 15, 2014

In the first round of Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) awards, OHSU was one of nine institutions to receive multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A total of $32 million was awarded for 38 grants. Both the Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE) and the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute will receive support for their work through this NIH initiative.

The BD2K initiative was launched by NIH in 2012, when the ability to leverage data from clinical and biological sources was recognized as an increasingly important aspect of future biomedical research. According to the NIH, BD2K is “projected to have a total investment of nearly $656 million through 2020, pending available funds.”

BD2K grants were given in four broad categories intended to enable data utilization, develop analysis methods and software, enhance training and establish centers of excellence. For DMICE, two R25 grants will total approximately $1 million over three years in the category of training enhancement. They will be used to develop open educational resources (OERs) that can be adapted for a variety of educational programs, from the undergraduate to graduate and professional levels and will develop a Big Data skills course that will make available curricula and data sets to provide training in methods for basic, clinical and translational researchers as well as clinicians, librarians, and others. All OHSU researchers, especially graduate students, will be eligible to take the skills course, and DMICE plans to incorporate the materials in its own courses in its biomedical informatics graduate program.

The OER project will be led by three PIs: William Hersh, M.D., professor and chair of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology, OHSU School of Medicine; Shannon McWeeney, Ph.D., associate professor of public health and preventative medicine; and Melissa Haendel, Ph.D., assistant professor of the ontology development group, OHSU Library and assistant professor of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology, OHSU School of Medicine. The skills development course will be led by David Dorr, M.D., M.S., associate professor of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology and Drs. McWeeney and Haendel.

OHSU Knight Cancer Institute’s Beat AML team will partner with colleagues at University of California Santa Cruz under this round of BD2K awards via a center of excellence grant intended “to create implementations capable of handling genomics datasets that are orders of magnitude larger than those that can now be handled.” Beat AML is a groundbreaking industry-academic research initiative, funded by The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, that is designed to accelerate development of potential therapies for acute myeloid leukemia (AML).

 

Read more:

NIH invests almost $32 million to increase utility of biomedical research data, from National Institutes of Health
NIH Awards $32-Million to Tackle Big Data in Medicine, from Chronicle of Higher Education
About Beat AML
About DMICE