The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded a five-year, $27,670,448 contract to the CyberInfrastructure Group (CIG) of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) at Virginia Tech to support the biomedical research community's work on infectious diseases. The funding will be used to integrate vital information on pathogens, provide key resources and tools to scientists, and help researchers to analyze genomic, proteomic, and other data arising from infectious disease research.
Bruno Sobral, professor and director of CIG and principal investigator of the project, commented: "The new award from the NIH will allow us to continue our work to support infectious disease research and the development of vaccine, diagnostic, or therapeutic targets for countermeasures. Over the past five years, VBI's CIG has led its own Bioinformatics Resource Center (BRC), PATRIC, and worked with other leading BRCs across the country to put in place informatics-based capabilities deployed as large-scale information systems." He added: "As we move ahead, we will be working hand-in-hand with a wide range of partners, including medical schools and public health institutions interested in translating the very latest scientific discoveries and innovation into practical health benefits for society at large."
The overall NIAID program will comprise four new Bioinformatics Resource Centers or BRCs and a new gateway portal for the entire project. Each BRC will focus on one of the following pathogen types: bacterial species; viral families; protozoan species; and invertebrate vectors of human pathogens. CIG will develop, implement, and manage the BRC for selected NIAID category A-C priority bacterial species and it will also develop the new gateway portal for the entire BRC program, which will be called the Pathogen Portal. Sobral remarked, "PATRIC 2.0 will position CIG to handle the designated bacterial data in the context of infectious diseases - the change in scale of data acquisition and analysis is astonishing and we are poised to learn a lot."
The new contract covers the development of two web-based resources for biomedical research. The first part of the project supports the development of the Pathogen Portal for the entire BRC program. The Pathogen Portal will serve as an informatics coordinating center and gateway for the four newly established BRCs. This publicly accessible web portal will provide general information about the BRC program, serve as a gateway to the individual BRC web sites, and provide a central data repository and analysis resource for all selected NIAID category A-C priority pathogens supported by the individual BRCs. Said Sobral, "In addition to its centralized coordination role, the Pathogen Portal project will work closely with other external partners, for example NIAID's Clinical Proteomics Centers for Infectious Diseases and Biodefense, among others, which is making candidate protein biomarkers linked to disease available to the wider scientific community."