The National Institutes of Health recently announced grants to develop new strategies to analyze and leverage the explosion of increasingly complex biomedical data sets, often referred to as Big Data. These NIH multi-institute awards constitute an initial investment of nearly $32 million in fiscal year 2014 by NIH's Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative, which is projected to have a total investment of nearly $656 million through 2020, pending available funds.
With the advent of transformative technologies for biomedical research, such as DNA sequencing and imaging, biomedical data generation is exceeding researchers' ability to capitalise on the data. The BD2K awards will support the development of new approaches, software, tools, and training programs to improve access to these data and the ability to make new discoveries using them. Investigators hope to explore novel analytics to mine large amounts of data, while protecting privacy, for eventual application to improving human health.
The funding will establish 12 centers that will each tackle specific data science challenges. The awards will also provide support for a consortium to cultivate a scientific community-based approach on the development of a data discovery index, and for data science training and workforce development.
Studies generating large amounts of data continue to proliferate, from imaging projects to epidemiological studies examining thousands of participants to large disease-oriented efforts such as The Cancer Genome Atlas, which examines the genomic underpinnings of more than 30 types of cancer, and the ENCODE Project, which seeks to identify all functional elements in the human genome. Such efforts have generated billions of data points and provide opportunities for the original researchers and other investigators to use these results in their own work to advance our knowledge of biology and biomedicine.
Dr. Philip E. Bourne, NIH associate director for data science, in calling for the establishment of a 'digital ecosystem' for biomedical research, said that the new BD2K programs are at the forefront of NIH's efforts to increase the efficiency and cost effectiveness of scientific discovery.
