The mission of the Bioinformatics Core (BIC) is to provide bioinformatics support for diverse approaches to cancer research in the COHCCC. The BIC collaborates with COHCCC governance committees to promulgate standards, optimize systems and minimize redundancy through continued integration of data, databases, applications and processes for enabling cost effective, collaborative, translational research. Since the last competitive renewal, the BIC has been working with experts in the field to establish a scalable high performance cyber-infrastructure equipped with close to 500 TB tiered storage repository with high bandwidth network connection, integrated cloud computing with internal TBs shared memory servers with more than 4000 hyper-threaded CPU and GPGPU processors, and external cloud computing to maximize both our infrastructure investment and provide infrastructure-on-demand. In addition, the BIC provides integrated laboratory information management systems (LIMS), which harbor research information portals shared among multiple core facilities (e.g., Functional Genomics and Genomic Sequencing, Drug Discovery and Structural Biology, Analytical Cytometry, Small Animal Imaging, and the developing Proteomics and Translational Research cores). The BIC also provides researchers with high-throughput biological data analysis, including integration with high-quality publicly available multi-disease, multi-cohort gene expression datasets. With highly-trained staff working in multidisciplinary teams, the BIC facilitates experimental design, QC/QA, data analysis, integration, annotation, dissemination, visualization and training for researchers. A new subscription-based chargeback policy was implemented in 2009 to offer tiered services to COHCCC members to be included in their grant proposals for adequate chargeback. The usage has nearly doubled from 45 subscribers in 2008 to 78 in 2010, and chargeback revenue has tripled from $46,487 in 2008 to $141,078 in 2010. Between 2007 and 2011, the BIC was used by a total of 88 principal investigators, 67 of whom are COHCCC members, and BIC staff collectively co-authored 52 peer-reviewed publications. The BIC's ongoing goal is to foster comprehensive bioinformatics support for researchers to enable collaborations among, basic, translational, clinical and population sciences researchers.
The overall goal of the Bioinformatics Core facility is to provide COHCCC investigators with high-throughput biological data analysis tools, data management and cyber-infrastructure, and training to foster collaborations and develop modern computational techniques. This goal enables the Cancer Center's mission of developing innovative new disease-fighting strategies in the battle against cancer.
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