Coordinating Center

NCRR Awards $22.2 Million to Fund BIRN Coordinating Center

Funding Will Enable More Streamlined Research

Research for prevention and better treatments of diseases such as Alzheimer's, depression and schizophrenia will become more efficient and effective thanks to computer software developed through the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN), supported by National Center for Research Resources.

In one of its latest efforts to improve information exchange, NCRR awarded $22.2 million in January 2009 to support the BIRN coordinating center at the University of Southern California, which will facilitate collaboration and data sharing among the network's research centers as well as researchers in many medical fields, including cardiology and cancer.

"The BIRN program connects scientists with their colleagues at other institutions to develop analytic tools that can be used for multi-site data integration," said Michael T. Marron, Ph.D., director of NCRR's Division of Biomedical Technology. "The coordinating center has an essential role in advancing technologies, such as new software-based solutions, that researchers across the nation can use to share biomedical images and other data applicable to the diagnosis and treatment of disease."

Coordinating center director and USC professor Carl Kesselman, PhD., will lead the five-year project, which will focus on moving BIRN from a data-sharing solution requiring specialized hardware to a more flexible software-only infrastructure. This move will make the software tools and data available through BIRN accessible to a wider range of biomedical and clinical researchers.

"Without a sophisticated bioinformatics capability-which only top engineers can provide-we cannot hope to translate the basic science into drugs and treatments that will improve the quality of life," said Kesselman. "BIRNCC can accelerate the rate of discoveries for many areas of biomedical research."

Other project collaborators include computer scientists, engineers and biomedical researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, Irvine; University of Chicago; Washington University in St. Louis; and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Launched in 2001, BIRN is part of the National Institutes of Health's effort to improve access to the rapidly increasing volumes of biomedical research information. Universities and research groups from the BIRN consortium participate in collaborative projects with an initial focus on human neuropsychiatric disease.

Some BIRN scientists are working on large-scale, cross-institutional imaging studies on Alzheimer's disease, depression, and schizophrenia using structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Others are studying animal models relevant to multiple sclerosis, attention deficit disorder and Parkinson's disease using MRI, whole brain histology and high-resolution light and electron microscopy.

Researchers in other medical fields can also benefit from the BIRN infrastructure, which allows individual researchers to share data locally or broadly, within research groups, across institutions or with the entire research community.

Visit www.nbirn.net/research for more about BIRN research and resources.

Contact Information