UCLA opens big data center

The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) has opened the Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biosciences which will work to unlock the biological basis of health and disease by tapping the power of big data and computational modeling.

The school also has established a doctoral program in bioinformatics, and the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, in which UCLA is one of four partner institutions, is at the forefront of utilizing big data in clinical care—including developing new pharmaceuticals and bringing new discoveries into the community, according to an announcement.

The institute is led by Alexander Hoffmann, professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics in the UCLA College, whose research aims to understand how our genes interact to ensure health or produce disease — and the roles played by such factors as food, environmental stresses, infectious agents and pharmaceuticals. Among the diseases for which Hoffmann’s research may lead to significant progress are cancer and immune disorders, because they are caused by errors in cellular decision-making.

Hoffmann says that biology’s million-dollar question is how genes and environment interact to ensure health or cause disease, he said. As UCLA researchers work to answer that question, they will collaborate with UCLA mathematicians who will create mathematical models that help them make sense of a tsunami of biological data.

Much of the data UCLA faculty will work with will come from the University of California Research eXchange (UCReX), which manages a large repository of clinical data — more than 12 million patient records. Dubinett said UCReX is in the process of adding millions of additional records through partnerships with other Los Angeles medical institutions and, eventually, other academic medical centers in California and throughout the U.S.

One of the major challenges in biology research in the past was generating data, said Hoffmann. “Now, the challenge is how to make sense of a tsunami of scientific data, to discover the critical patterns and to tell the signal from the noise. The opportunities to develop accurate predictions are unprecedented.”