What You Should Know:
– Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the University of California San Diego have been awarded an $8.5 million grant to create a data integration hub aimed at accelerating novel therapeutics and cures for diseases within initiatives supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund.
– NIH Common Fund programs are large-scale projects designed to collect cutting-edge biomedical research data from human cells, tissues, and patients to rapidly advance biomedical research.
The Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE) Program
The Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE) program was created by the NIH to enhance the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of data generated by NIH Common Fund programs, thereby ensuring adherence to the FAIR guiding principles for scientific data.
Building on the successes of the pilot phase of the CFDE program, and with a five-year investment of $17 million, the NIH has established two new centers: the CFDE Data Resource Center and the CFDE Knowledge Center. Investigators from Icahn Mount Sinai and the University of California San Diego were selected to lead the CFDE Data Resource Center, and investigators from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard were awarded the CFDE Knowledge Center.
Currently, most Common Fund datasets are dispersed across distinct data portals, resulting in underutilization due to the absence of standardized community practices and shared data processing protocols. By enabling seamless discovery of datasets across the Common Fund data, uniformly processing the data, and better combining data from different programs, the investigators anticipate the emergence of synergistic discoveries.
By working with the Common Fund data coordination centers, the Data Resource Center and Knowledge Center are expected to produce highly valuable computational resources for the entire field of biomedical research.
CFDE Key Objectives
The research teams work will involve:
- Establishing a Data Resource Portal to enable user-friendly queries of Common Fund data sets
- Developing the CFDE Portal for the ecosystem, housing information and links to related resources, trainings, and events
- Assisting Common Fund programs in standardizing how metadata, data, and digital resources are handled in the ecosystem, and liaising with other relevant NIH efforts
Leadership
Dr. Ma’ayan and Dr. Subramaniam will lead the Data Resource Center. The Knowledge Center award will be led by Jason Flannick, PhD, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the Division of Genetics and Genomics at Boston Children’s Hospital, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute, along with Dr. Noel Burtt, Director of the Diabetes Research & Knowledge Portals Program at the Broad Institute and Dr. Kyle Gaulton, Associate Professor in Pediatrics at the University of California San Diego.