This Biomedical Informatics Core (BIC) will provide informatics services to support the basic science,preclinical and clinical research programs in each of the themes (Bacterial Pathogenesis and Therapeutics,Viral Pathogenesis and Therapeutics, B-Cell Related Prophylaxis and Therapeutics, Vaccine Platforms,Pathogen Detection and Diagnostics, and Smallpox vaccine project. The BIC will simultaneously pursueresearch projects in genomics, proteomics, structural biology, preclinical and clinical informatics designed torapidly characterize and identify virulent factors of pathogen genomes, delineate the relationship of thepathogen genome to other known genomes, and to provide rapid large scale functional annotation to assist inthe immobilization of the pathogen. The resulting set of disparate data will be integrated with BIC services in aPathogen Platform software environment that can be readily accessed by the appropriate researchers. Thus,the two missions of the BIC will enrich one another. To understand pathogen biology, pathogen-hostinteractions, and pursue rational approaches to vaccines and therapeutics, investigators will need to integratean increasingly large and complex wealth of clinical, genomic, and proteomic data. Research problems willemerge through efforts to address service needs. The ability of the BIC to anticipate and respond to challengeswill be enhanced by research programs pursued by members of the BIC. The BIC has the additional challengeof educating potential users to the power and limitations of medical and bioinformatics technologies. To meetthese challenges, the BIC has been established in close collaboration with laboratories in a variety ofdisciplines and with clinicians.This core project combines the efforts of some of the leading biomedical informatics researchers in thefields of comparative genomics, structural/functional proteomics, and medical informatics. The Department ofMedical Informatics of Columbia University, comprising over 40 faculty conducting a wide spectrum ofinformatics research; the Department of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry at Yale, with 33 faculty members(10 members of the National Academy of Science) pursuing research on quantitative biology, biophysics, andcomputational biology; and the Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics at SUNY Buffalo, soon to be one of theworlds largest centers in Systems Biology Bioinformatics.
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