NIH invests in big data

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded grants designed to develop new strategies to analyze and leverage big data.

An initial investment of $32 million in fiscal year 2014 was made by NIH's Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative, which is projected to have a total investment of nearly $656 million through 2020.

The explosion of increasingly complex biomedical datasets, according to a statement, is exceeding researchers' ability to capitalize on the data. The BD2K awards will support the development of new approaches, software, tools and training programs to improve access to these data and the ability to make new discoveries using them. Investigators hope to explore novel analytics to mine large amounts of data, while protecting privacy, for eventual application to improving human health.

“Data creation in today’s research is exponentially more rapid than anything we anticipated even a decade ago,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD. “Mammoth datasets are emerging at an accelerated pace in today’s biomedical research and these funds will help us overcome the obstacles to maximizing their utility. The potential of these data, when used effectively, is quite astounding.”

The funding will establish 12 centers that will each tackle specific data science challenges. The awards also will provide support for a consortium to cultivate a scientific community-based approach on the development of a data discovery index, and for data science training and workforce development.

“The future of biomedical research is about assimilating data across biological scales from molecules to populations,” said Philip E. Bourne, PhD, NIH associate director for data science. “As such, the health of each one of us is a big data problem. Ensuring that we are getting the most out of the research data that we fund is a high priority for NIH.” He called for a "digital ecosystem" for biomedical research and said the new BD2K programs are at the forefront of NIH’s efforts to increase the efficiency and cost effectiveness of scientific discovery.

The following are the four main components of the new BD2K awards:

• Centers of Excellence for Big Data Computing. These 11 centers will develop innovative approaches, methods, software, tools and other resources. Development efforts will focus on specific research questions, but output is expected to be more generally relevant to various aspects of big data science, such as data integration and use, analysis of genomic data and managing data from EHRs.
• BD2K-LINCS Perturbation Data Coordination and Integration Center. This center will be a data coordination center for the NIH Common Fund’s Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures (LINCS) program, which aims to characterize how a variety of types of cells, tissues and networks respond to disruption by drugs and other factors. The center will support data science research focusing on interpreting and integrating LINCS-generated data from different data types and databases in the LINCS-funded projects. This center is co-funded by BD2K and the NIH Common Fund.
• BD2K Data Discovery Index Coordination Consortium. This program will create a consortium to begin a community-based development of a biomedical data discovery index that will enable discovery, access and citation of biomedical research datasets.
• Training and Workforce Development. These awards support the education and training of current and future generations of researchers who will specialize in data science fields, as well as those whose work may require certain expertise in the use of or generation of large amounts of data and data resources.

The BD2K initiative, launched in December 2013, is a trans-NIH program with funding from all 27 institutes and centers, as well as the NIH Common Fund.