StemCell Therapy

BUFFALO, N.Y. Personalized medicine, tracking of deadlyepidemics and new insights into drug side effects are just a few ofthe ways that biomedical informatics is helping enhance medicalresearch and clinical care. Big data science holds the promise ofrevolutionizing how health care data are used to provide bettercare for patients.

But as more and more health care data become available, theability to efficiently analyze and utilize these data is growingincreasingly problematic. At the same time, there arentenough people trained in the field of biomedical informatics.

Now, a new five-year $2.5 million grant to the Department ofBiomedical Informatics in the Jacobs School of Medicine andBiomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo will train a newcadre of research leaders skilled in analyzing and interpretingthese data.

The funding, known as T15, from the National Library of Medicineof the National Institutes of Health, supports doctoral andpostdoctoral level training for research careers in biomedicalinformatics and data science. The training programs are designed tomeet the growing need for investigators trained in biomedicalcomputing, data science and related fields with applications inhealth care clinical informatics, translational bioinformatics andclinical research informatics.

Over the five years of the grant, the department will be able totrain as many as 15 doctoral and postdoctoral researchers inbiomedical informatics.

UBs program will focus on three major areas:

clinical informatics, including socio-technical and human-centereddesign, workflow analysis and cybersecurity.

translational bioinformatics, including database management,pharmacogenomics and predictive modeling.

clinical research informatics, including a big data sciencetraining program, statistical machine learning and data mining.

The NLM grant puts the department at the forefront ofthis rapidly changing field, said Peter Elkin, MD, professorand chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, and directorof the new training program. Elkin also is director of theinformatics core of UBs Clinical and Translational ScienceInstitute.

Biomedical informatics is the field that will provide theinfrastructure necessary to allow scientists to performtranslational and clinical genomic research moreefficiently, he explained. The National Library ofMedicine funding, together with our established fellowship programin clinical informatics, will allow our department to play a keyrole in developing tomorrows research leaders in biomedicalinformatics.

He added that trainees in the new program will benefit fromUBs existing Big Data-Scientist Training EnhancementProgram, funded by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs incollaboration with the National Cancer Institute of the NIH. The UBprogram was one of just six sites funded nationally in 2015.

Read this article:
Biomedical informatics gets a boost with $2.5 million grant - UB News Center

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