Overview
Advances in biomedicine and its effective translation from the bench to the bedside (and back) requires the efficient and secure development and deployment of cyber-infrastructure (i.e. computing, network and storage platforms) in conjunction with analytic, and interpretive methods (data integration and data mining) to optimize the integration and transformation of increasingly voluminous biomedical data from high-throughput experiments and Internet enabled medical devices. The challenge is how one goes about taking advantage of available cyber-infrastructure and expertise from a spectrum of disciplines located in public/private institutions within the State of New Jersey to enable the goal of realizing proactive, predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory health.
Background
The "Biomedical Informatics Summit" is a joint meeting of The Cancer Institute of New Jersey (CINJ) (www.cinj.org) and the DIMACS Center based at Rutgers University (dimacs.rutgers.edu). CINJ is one of only 41 National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers in the country and the only one in New Jersey. It receives funding from the state of New Jersey, the NCI and National Institute of Health (NIH) and a number of charitable foundations such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. DIMACS was founded in 1988 as one of the original National Science Foundation science and technology centers and has some 300 affiliated scientists, including leading experts in methods of mathematics, computer science, statistics and operations research dealing with data mining, algorithmic analysis, security, data privacy, and mathematical and computational modeling in bioinformatics, epidemiology, and related areas of the biological sciences. CINJ has become a full member of DIMACS and the CINJ/DIMACS partnership is encouraging collaborations that address the mathematical/computational challenges in Health/Clinical/Nursing Informatics and Translational Medicine, where one has to deal with very large, noisy data sets from the bench and the clinic in an efficient, effective and secure manner. One key challenge is how one goes about building a secure, efficient network that will enable the sharing of confidential patient data for consultation, education and for accrual for clinical trials etc. Furthermore, integration of data sets from the basic research labs and the clinic will significantly advance disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment and make a real difference in the cost of delivery of health care. It will also facilitate, through pharmacogenomics, addressing the paradigm shift in drug discovery which is focused on biomarkers for prevention and personalized medicine - areas rich in challenging problems from the mathematical and computing perspective.
Goal of the Summit
The "Biomedical Informatics Summit" will bring together computational/computer scientists, clinical/bioinformaticians, mathematicians, telecommunications experts, computer security and privacy experts, basic researchers, clinical researchers and translational scientists to outline informatics challenges in their ongoing research and how this is addressed within their organization. The central aim of this meeting is to bring together intellectual leaders from a variety of disciplines within the state to help address key challenges in health care informatics (i.e. in research, translation and delivery) from a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, quantitative perspective.
Expected Outcome
The Summit aims to foster new collaborations and partnerships between academic and industry-based scientists through-out New Jersey, leveraging public-private partnerships for accelerated development and deployment of new healthcare informatics standards, protocols, tools and technologies that will enhance the delivery of health care for the benefit of our citizens. To this end, this Summit will facilitate formation of multi-disciplinary multi-institutional consortiums who will pool there expertise to address the challenges outlined above. This will include (but will not be limited to), applying for state and federal funding as part of a New Jersey-wide consortia such as the recently announced ``Physical Science - Oncology Centers" (grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-CA-09-009.html) by the National Cancer Institute with CINJ as the lead institution, the "Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation " program (www.nsf.gov/crssprgm/cdi) by the National Science Foundation, with DIMACS as the lead organization and the "Clinical And Translational Science Awards" (www.ncrr.nih.gov/clinical_research_resources/clinical_and_translational_science_awards) by the National Institute of Health with UMDNJ as the lead institution. The anticipated initial outcome from our Summit will be for participants to identify mutual areas of interest and form program partnerships (between institutions and across disciplines) that will be included in these grant applications.
Meeting Structure
Speakers will be given 15 minutes (10 minutes for presentation, 5 minutes for questions). Time limits will be strictly enforced. Please focus your presentation on:
We will have poster boards in place for posters about your organization and its informatics activities relevant to this meeting. (Please contact bosweldj@umdnj.edu if you plan to present a poster).
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