With $8.5 million in federal support, leading researchers
at three universities are creating an ambitious digital
network that will allow cardiovascular researchers
worldwide to easily exchange data and expertise on
heart-related illnesses. The Johns Hopkins-based project,
called the Cardiovascular Research Grid, is expected to be
a boon to the large community of researchers who will use
these digital tools to find new ways to prevent, detect and
treat life-threatening cardiac ailments.
The Cardiovascular Research Grid will be headquartered
in the 79,000-square-foot Computational Science and
Engineering Building, now under construction on the
Homewood campus. The building is expected to open this
summer.
To launch this network, the National Heart, Lung and
Blood Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health,
has approved a four-year grant that began March 1. The
digital project will be directed by the
Institute for
Computational Medicine at Johns Hopkins, in
collaboration with the Department of Biomedical Informatics
at Ohio State University College of Medicine and the Center
for Research in Biological Systems at the University of
California, San Diego.
The project teams will develop open, grid-based
software tools that will enable other research groups to
become "nodes" in the new grid. Once connected to the grid,
researchers will be able to access and share experimental
data, data analysis tools and computational models relating
to heart function in healthy people and those with cardiac
disease to protect privacy, none of the heart data will
carry information identifying patients from whom it was
obtained.
"There had never been a simple and direct way for
cardiovascular researchers to share, analyze and model this
important data," said Raimond Winslow, director of the
Institute for Computational Medicine at Johns Hopkins and
principal investigator in the project. "Now, there will
be."
Winslow, who also is a professor in the
Department of Biomedical
Engineering, added, "This is the direction in which
biomedical research is heading in the 21st century. In the
past, biomedical research was mainly done in individual
labs. The Cardiovascular Research Grid will enable us to
assemble large, geographically distributed research teams
and bring together the leading experts in the world to
focus on a common problem, regardless of their location.
This grid will enable experimentalists to share their data
with computational scientists, who will analyze and model
the data. The computational scientists will then share
their results with their experimental colleagues, who use
it to refine their experiments. In this fashion, we believe
the creation of the Cardiovascular Research Grid will
accelerate the discovery of new approaches for treating
heart disease."
In deciding to fund the new grid, the National Heart,
Lung and Blood Institute recognized the important
contribution that bioinformatics can now make in developing
a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of heart disease
and in the development of new therapeutic approaches.
During the first year of funding, the organizers of
the new grid plan will deploy the initial infrastructure
and software that will enable researchers to begin sharing
and analyzing information. To accomplish this, Joel Saltz,
chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Ohio
State, and his team will develop the software
infrastructure that ties together resources. "The
Cardiovascular Research Grid will allow experts from
different disciplines to combine their insights and to
coordinate their efforts," said Saltz, who holds Ohio
State's Davis Endowed Chair of Cancer. "The ability to
bring together many types of biomedical information will
have a tremendous impact on the pace of progress in
cardiovascular research."
The Johns Hopkins team will focus on development of
standardized vocabularies for describing biomedical data,
models and data analysis applications. In addition to
Winslow, the team will include faculty members Michael I.
Miller and Tilak Ratnanather, both of the Department of
Biomedical Engineering; and Donald Geman, Daniel Naiman and
Laurent Younes, all of the Department of Applied
Mathematics and Statistics.
Mark Ellisman, director of the National Center for
Microscopy and Imaging at the University of California, San
Diego, and his team will be responsible for developing
effective and intuitive ways for users to interact with the
Cardiovascular Research Grid.
"Developing and deploying cyberinfrastructure to
capitalize on emerging technologies to promote better
collaboration and accelerate research is a core focus of
our center's efforts," said Ellisman, who also is director
of UCSD's Center for Research in Biological Systems. "With
a track record of developing scalable cyberinfrastructure
to foster interdisciplinary investigations among teams of
researchers in microscopy, neuroimaging and the
environmental health sciences, CRBS is eager to collaborate
with the Johns Hopkins team on developing the
Cardiovascular Research Grid. We're looking forward to
implementing an infrastructure that will effectively pool
the diverse expertise, applications and instrumentation of
the cardiovascular research community into a unified
knowledge base, one that will enable researchers to tackle
cardiac disease studies of greater scope and
complexity."