$4.3m for med science research data platform
[ UniNews Vol. 14, No. 16
5 - 19 September 2005 ] By Elaine Mulcahy
A University of Melbourne-led project that enables researchers from various institutions to share medical research data, images, tissue banks and genetic information across a range of diseases has been awarded $4.3 million by the Federal Government.
The Bio21 Molecular Medicine Informatics Model (Bio21:MIMM) is a multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary research and training platform for clinical research. It has already proven successful in a Bio21:MIMM pilot across multiple collaborative universities, research institutes and teaching hospitals.
The project is led by Associate Professor Terence O’Brien in the University’s Department of Medicine at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in collaboration with Melbourne Health and the Victorian Partnership of Advanced Computing (VPAC).
The aim is to make it possible for researchers to view, compare and analyse data that may be of interest to them across disciplines and institutions.
“To date much clinical research data, while extremely valuable and extending as far back as 50 years, has been fragmented and residing in stand-alone research and clinical data sets,” Associate Professor O’Brien says.
“The Bio21:MIMM project grew out of a recognised need by researchers to integrate a variety of data related to a particular disease in selected groups of patients that are often held in different databases by different organisations.”
The Bio21: MIMM consists of a unique resource of data sets physically located at various organisations that can be integrated, searched and queried by researchers in each of the organisations – in a sense creating a virtual community.
The Bio21:MIMM pilot successfully integrated research data and clinical information across multiple datasets in three disease areas – colorectal cancer, epilepsy and diabetes – in seven institutions. It also included effective actions to manage the security of the clinical research records and genetic data, as well as addressing privacy, intellectual property and ethical issues.
“With this new funding, the Bio21:MIMM project will now be expanded to increase the amount and variety of data in epilepsy, diabetes and colorectal cancer. It will also extend to include data on research into multiple sclerosis, stroke, Parkinson’s disease, prostate cancer, cystic fibrosis and asthma,” Associate Professor O’Brien says.
The infrastructure will also be expanded to include the University of Melbourne, Monash University and the University of Tasmania via their affiliated hospitals and medical research institutions, providing a unique and powerful research infrastructure of integrated medical research data to Australian researchers.
The new funding was awarded under the Commonwealth government’s Systemic Infrastructure Initiative. A total of $20 million was shared among nine projects.
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