National Sleep Research Resource Center to be Established

Newswise — A $7.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine will establish the NHLBI National Sleep Research Resource (NSRR), a comprehensive, easily accessible and well-annotated national repository of sleep data. The 5-year grant will make data from more than 50,000 sleep studies available to sleep researchers across the country.

“The project represents efforts to use big data in powerful and cost-effective ways, leveraging prior investments in research data collection, with a goal of enhancing clinical and translational work in human sleep medicine and physiology,” said Susan Redline, MD, MPH, associate clinical director of the Division of Sleep Medicine at BWH and principal investigator on the NSSR grant. “The resource will provide opportunities for investigators to address critical questions regarding subgroup susceptibility to sleep disorders; the impact of sleep disorders on important clinical outcomes; the role of sleep disorders as mediators in the pathogenesis of cardiopulmonary diseases; and genetic susceptibility to sleep disorders.”

“This project represents a true collaborative partnership among informaticians, data scientists, and clinical investigators,” said GQ Zhang, PhD, Division Chief of Medical Informatics and Professor of Computer Science at Case Western Reserve University. Zhang serves as the chief architect and principal investigator of NSRR.

“A national resource such as NSRR can only be achieved through innovative computer science and informatics approaches, using state-of-the-art data mapping, visualization and query tools to allow investigators to search and aggregate data across multiple studies and time points,” stated Zhang. The project objectives are well aligned with a number of recent national priorities such as NIH’s BD2K (Big Data to Knowledge) initiative; the BRAIN (Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) project; and the Office of Science and Technology’s Open Science policy on increasing access to results of federally funded research.”

About Brigham and Women’s HospitalBrigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) is a 793-bed nonprofit teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School and a founding member of Partners HealthCare. BWH has more than 3.5 million annual patient visits, is the largest birthing center in New England and employs nearly 15,000 people. The Brigham’s medical preeminence dates back to 1832, and today that rich history in clinical care is coupled with its national leadership in patient care, quality improvement and patient safety initiatives, and its dedication to research, innovation, community engagement and educating and training the next generation of health care professionals.

Through investigation and discovery conducted at its Biomedical Research Institute (BRI), BWH is an international leader in basic, clinical and translational research on human diseases, more than 1,000 physician-investigators and renowned biomedical scientists and faculty supported by nearly $650 million in funding. For the last 25 years, BWH ranked second in research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) among independent hospitals.

BWH continually pushes the boundaries of medicine, including building on its legacy in transplantation by performing a partial face transplant in 2009 and the nation’s first full face transplant in 2011. BWH is also home to major landmark epidemiologic population studies, including the Nurses' and Physicians' Health Studies and the Women's Health Initiative. For more information and resources, please visit BWH’s online newsroom.

About Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine Founded in 1843, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine is the largest medical research institution in Ohio and is among the nation’s top medical schools for research funding from the National Institutes of Health. The School of Medicine is recognized throughout the international medical community for outstanding achievements in teaching. The School’s innovative and pioneering Western Reserve2 curriculum interweaves four themes--research and scholarship, clinical mastery, leadership, and civic professionalism--to prepare students for the practice of evidence-based medicine in the rapidly changing health care environment of the 21st century. Nine Nobel Laureates have been affiliated with the School of Medicine.

Annually, the School of Medicine trains more than 800 MD and MD/PhD students and ranks in the top 25 among U.S. research-oriented medical schools as designated by U.S. News & World Report’s “Guide to Graduate Education.”

The School of Medicine’s primary affiliate is University Hospitals Case Medical Center and is additionally affiliated with MetroHealth Medical Center, the Louis Stokes Cleveland Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and the Cleveland Clinic, with which it established the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University in 2002. http://casemed.case.edu