Harvard Medical School - Partners Healthcare Center for Genetics and Genomics
National Center for Bio-medical Computing at Partners HealthCare
brings the latest research from "bench to bedside";
Project funded through multi-year NIH grant.
BOSTON - September -- Physicians and researchers have more genetic, medical, and patient data than ever before -
but finding a way to bring millions of data points together and translate that information to improved care for
patients has become one of modern medicine's biggest challenges for the future. Now, thanks to a new program
of the National Institute of Health (NIH), physicians, researchers, and information experts are coming together
to find a way to eliminate the bottleneck between "bench and bedside."
The NIH-funded initiative, a National Center for Biomedical Computing called Informatics for Integrating Biology
and the Bedside - and known as "I2B2" -- is led by Isaac Kohane, M.D., Ph.D. of Brigham and Women's Hospital,
Children's Hospital, Harvard MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and Harvard Medical School, and
John Glaser, Ph.D., Chief Information Officer and Vice President of Information Systems at Partners HealthCare.
"I2B2" is a $20 million, five-year project designed to enable physicians to translate relevant findings and
hypotheses into therapies for human health.
"We believe a project like "I2B2" may lead to the next generation of medical breakthroughs and discovery. We
will finally have a way to blend huge volumes of clinical research and phenotypic data with genomic research data
and apply that knowledge to patients and finally make individualized, preventative medicine a reality for many
diseases with a genetic basis," said Center Director and Chief Scientist Isaac Kohane, MD, Ph.D.
"Providing high quality and efficient health care isn't possible anymore without a sophisticated marriage of
information technology and state-of-the-art science. But bringing them together to inform patient care is a
tremendous undertaking. I2B2 is about harnessing all the possibilities afforded by the full array of new
information provided by genomic research - and making it real for doctors and patients," said Center Co-Director
John Glaser, Ph.D. Chief Information Officer.
According to Dr. Kohane, I2B2's framework for conducting clinical research in and across large multidisciplinary
academic medical centers is designed to establish a "new" biomedicine to "fully exploits the fruit of the genomic
revolution for clinical practice and allows clinical care to be leveraged to advance basic biological research."
Kohane and Glaser are fortunate to have as their laboratory Partners Healthcare, which includes two academic medical
centers (Brigham and Women's and Massachusets General Hospital) as well as several community hospitals and other
hospitals affiliated with Harvard Medical School including Children's Hospital, Joslin Diabetes Center.
The collaboration also includes Harvard Medical School, the Harvard-Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics,
the Harvard School of Public Health, the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
The Center will test its developments on four major diseases known to be associated with complex genetic defects:
diabetes mellitus, airways disease (asthma), hypertension, and Huntington's Disease.
The "I2B2" project is also planning an outreach program aimed at helping to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities
in health and health care by rapidly disseminating the new informatics tools and methodologies to underserved
communities. I2B2 is seeking corporate sponsorship to expand this effort.
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