The goal of clinical and translational cancer research is to rapidly convert novel advances In bench research to improvements in patient care and to relay findings from clinical studies employing such new and increasingly customized diagnostics and therapeutics back to the bench for further refinement of our understanding of tumorigenesis. To realize this aim, the physician-scientist must be able to Integrate diverse and complex datasets that include clinical information obtained from the patient or participant with the results of routine laboratory tests, imaging, biospecimens, molecular profiling (e.g. microarray analysis, proteomics, and lipidomics), and genome annotation information. These data must be co-analyzed and visualized to gain a comprehensive understanding of the disease process. Furthermore, access to ali of this information and findings from analyses must be seamlessly available to physicians, clinician-scientists, and bench scientists both within and across organizations to reduce the barrier between basic science and clinical research. Given these requirements, the field of biomedical informatics the application of computer science and information technology to the problems of data management In healthcare and biomedical research is a critical and necessary component of effective translational research. To address this need within the SCC and WU, the Bioinformatics Core (now renamed to the Biomedical Informatics Core) was created in 2002. As reflected in the name change, over time, the Core's services have grown to address not only bloinformatics/computational challenges associated with managing, storing, and analyzing high dimensional data sets (e.g. microarray, proteomic, and NextGen sequencing data sets) but also to support syntactic and semantic needs required to represent, store, and share clinical studies/trials and biospecimen data sets. These latter activities and services have been catalyzed by our participation and leadership in the caBlG Initiative as well as the coalescence of informatics at WU into the Center for Biomedical Informatics through the consolidation of personnel, hardware, and software of many different P30-based cores and the CTSA Biomedical Informatics Program.
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