In addition to direct biomedical interventions, precision health faces challenges in creating, understanding, analyzing, storing, and securing large amounts of heterogeneous data and is therefore also an informatics challenge.
The Data and Informatics scientific pillar will address 3 principal challenges
- Scaling computing infrastructure to meet the needs for millions of patients. The new computing infrastructure will enable communication among patients, care providers, and researchers; it will address the research needs for various disease and therapy conditions, as well as meet the analytics, storage, and security needs for integrated health and molecular data; it will address the challenge of translating data-driven discovery into practice.
- Development of knowledge-discovery methodologies, collaborative research projects, and novel informatics tools for understanding: molecular mechanisms of disease, drug target and drug selection, omics data analysis and interpretation, clinical phenotyping of patients, and clinical decision systems.
- Training the next generation of experts through a biomedical informatics educational program. Next-generation informaticians will be broadly trained in a collaborative research heavy environment that addresses the needs in both precision health research and clinical practice.