Newswise — As advanced technology continues to allow for the simplification and collection of massive amounts of data in the area of health care and research, experts in the field are looking at how to best streamline that process. That is why The Cancer Institute of New Jersey (CINJ) and the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) recently held a "Biomedical Informatics Summit," bringing together intellectual leaders from a variety of disciplines within the state to help address key challenges in the gathering and analysis of health care information for the benefit of patients. CINJ is a Center of Excellence of UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and is a full member of DIMACS, which is a research center based at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
Biomedical informatics is the intellectual marriage of math, science and computers, used in concert to deal with massive amounts of health data and the processing of information by biological systems. It can lead to the understanding of what regulates the normal behavior of cells and how its breakdown gives rise to uncontrolled cell growth leading to diseases such as cancer. It can also lead to early discovery of disease trends through identification of patterns and anomalies in patient data. CINJ and DIMACS have recently formed a partnership and launched the Biomedical Informatics Summit as a first step in introducing their respective communities to one another.
Often times, information collected from clinical, genetic and laboratory tests resides in different locations and due to privacy and security concerns, cannot be easily accessed via the "information superhighway." This often slows the sharing of information and keeps barriers between researchers. By utilizing the latest technology to collect, correlate, analyze and assimilate a full range of biomedical data in a secure manner, researchers will be able to better understand the causes of diseases such as cancer. With such integration, there is also the need to make sure that patient privacy is protected.
A major theme among the Summit speakers was that of how to take advantage of available cyber-infrastructure located in public/private institutions within the state to enable the goal of realizing proactive, predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory health. Participants hailed from academia, the pharmaceutical and information technology industries, and New Jersey State government, and represented numerous disciplines. They used the daylong event as a networking opportunity on how to share resources, experience and expertise in the future.
Gunaretnam (Guna) Rajagopal, PhD, the executive director of the CINJ Bioinformatics Program, expressed confidence that the recent gathering will result in new collaborations, "By coming together to identify mutual areas of interest and form program partnerships, we are hopeful that as a collective we will be able to attract funding for this critical work. By taking advantage of the tremendous advances in technology, we have an opportunity to deepen our understanding of cancer and other diseases. We are pleased to partner with DIMACS in leading these efforts."
DIMACS Director Fred S. Roberts, PhD, notes DIMACS is delighted to welcome CINJ as a partner, "The opportunities for collaboration in this area are great when we combine the DIMACS strengths in data analysis, algorithm development, and privacy-preserving information sharing, with the CINJ strengths in bridging the gap between theoretical work in genetics, bioinformatics, and clinical medicine. We are pleased with the enormous response from the Summit, and it gives us great confidence that we are on to something big."
Both Drs. Rajagopal and Roberts note that integration of data from basic research labs and the clinic will significantly advance disease prevention, and that it also can have a positive impact on diagnosis and treatment, which can decrease the cost of healthcare delivery. They also believe it will facilitate a shift in drug discovery, which is focused on biomarkers for prevention and personalized medicine " areas that often present challenging problems from the mathematical and computing perspective.
They plan to continue with the summit format on a regular basis in order to update the community on their progress and are confident that they will accomplish the outlined goals.
About The Cancer Institute of New JerseyThe Cancer Institute of New Jersey (www.cinj.org) is the state's first and only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, and is dedicated to improving the prevention, detection, treatment and care of patients with cancer. CINJ's physician-scientists engage in translational research, transforming their laboratory discoveries into clinical practice quite literally bringing research to life. The Cancer Institute of New Jersey is a center of excellence of UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. To support CINJ, please call the Cancer Institute of New Jersey Foundation at 1-888-333-CINJ.
The Cancer Institute of New Jersey Network is comprised of hospitals throughout the state and provides a mechanism to rapidly disseminate important discoveries into the community. Flagship Hospital: Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. Affiliate Hospitals: Bayshore Community Hospital, Carol G. Simon Cancer Center at Morristown Memorial Hospital, Carol G. Simon Cancer Center at Overlook Hospital, CentraState Healthcare System, Cooper University Hospital*, Jersey Shore University Medical Center, JFK Medical Center, Raritan Bay Medical Center, Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital at Hamilton (CINJ at Hamilton), Saint Peter's University Hospital, Somerset Medical Center, Southern Ocean County Hospital, The University Hospital/UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School*, and University Medical Center at Princeton. *Academic Affiliate
About DIMACSDIMACS (http://dimacs.rutgers.edu), a research center based at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, was founded in 1988 as one of the original National Science Foundation science and technology centers. It is a partnership of several academic and corporate research institutions and has some 300 affiliated scientists, including leading experts in methods of mathematics, computer science, statistics and operations research dealing with data mining, algorithmic analysis, security, data privacy, and mathematical and computational modeling in bioinformatics, epidemiology, and related areas of the biological sciences.
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