The State University of New York at Buffalo has assembled a multi-disciplinary team of investigators to plan and establish a National Program of Excellence in Biomedical Computing. The overall theme of the center is """"""""Novel Data Mining Algorithms for Applications in Genomics"""""""" with a focus on the development of novel techniques for storing, managing, analyzing, modeling and visualizing multi-dimensional data sets. We intend to provide the expertise and infrastructure that will merge the research activities of computational and biomedical scientists. The focus of the proposed research is the study of common diseases, such as cancer, multiple sclerosis and coronary artery disease in which the underlying causes are multi-factorial. In this new paradigm, we will use advanced computational techniques and approaches to convert raw genomic data into knowledge that will advance the understanding of these common diseases and potentially identify new modalities of treatment. The Center will play a critical role in fostering multidisciplinary collaborations between faculty from the Departments of Computer Science and Engineering, Biology, Chemistry, Pharmaceutical Science and various departments in the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. By co-locating biomedical and computer scientists, common understanding of research approaches will result in the development of computational tools that will meet the real-life needs of the biomedical researchers to help advance their projects. The Center will provide a broad range of educational and training activities for individuals who wish to pursue a career focusing on computational biology and bioinformatics. The focus of the education program will be the interdisciplinary training of computer science and engineering students who wish to pursue research in functional genomics and other biomedical areas, and the cross training of biomedically oriented students in topics with more of a computing orientation. We have identified three development projects that provide unique scientific opportunities to integrate the expertise of mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists with medical scientists, and to investigate novel computational approaches. These computational related projects are: 1. Data integration and data mining of clinical data and genomic data to advance clinical and epidemiological genetics as well as drug effect studies; 2. Pharmacodynamic analysis of drug-responsive gene expression changes; and 3. Chemi-genetic approaches to mapping regulatory pathways. These research projects will be supported by three core resources: genomics core, computational core, and clinical core. The common nature of these applications is that they all generate multidimensional data sets with numerical, functional or symbolic attributes. The management, retrieval and visualization of these data sets and analyses is likely to prove to be a rate limiting factor for new biomedical discoveries and the development of techniques for the effective analyses of genomic datasets is a critical step for the medical applications of bioinformatics.
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