“caBIG™ in Action” at the 5th Annual Meeting
caBIG™ held its 5th Annual Meeting in Washington DC on June 23-25, 2008. The meeting brought together a diverse group of attendees to receive hands on experience deploying and using caBIG™ technology, and to learn how caBIG™ can improve basic and clinical research in their home institutions by facilitating collaboration and data-sharing. More than 1,100 researchers, clinicians, and informaticians gathered for the event.
A Newcomer’s session provided attendees with caBIG™ fundamentals, as well as essential information they would need to begin deployment. Later in the meeting, the traditional Hack-a-thon—where developers work in teams to quickly add new features—became a Deploy-a-thon, as newcomers worked with caBIG™ veterans to install caBIG™ software on their own computers.
Knowledge Centers Announced to Facilitate caBIG™ Adoption/Adaption
One of the key announcements coming from the 2008 caBIG™ annual meeting was the official launch of the first six caBIG™ Knowledge Centers. The Knowledge Centers are part of the Enterprise Support Network (ESN), a multiorganizational effort providing expertise, tools, and services designed to support individuals and organizations who want to “Get Connected with caBIG™”, and to foster continued development of caBIG™ tools and infrastructure.
Knowledge Centers are NCI-supported entities that will form the center of research and clinical communities around specific domains in which they have expertise. Each center provides an authoritative, web-based repository of knowledge and information about caBIG™ tools and technologies, and is tasked with providing resources, expertise, and support needed to drive broader implementation of caBIG™ across a given domain.
caBIG™ Enables Personalized Medicine
In addition to receiving the information on how to put caBIG™ to work facilitating research, leaders from the NCI, Office of the National Coordinator, and academic medical centers provided a larger context for the impact caBIG™ will have on biomedical research.
Dr. Kenneth Buetow (NCI) described the pathway he envisions to a new model for biomedicine, noting that caBIG™ has already produced the tools and infrastructure needed to enable the key functions of molecular medicine. In coming months and years caBIG™ can be expanded to bring all the previously-siloed constituencies together to form a healthcare system in which clinical outcomes information improves discovery research, and patient care is linked to clinical research.
Dr. Robert Kolodner (National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) provided a road map to show how information technology will play a crucial role in an integrated healthcare system. He also discussed how caBIG™ is enabling the clinical, research, and information technology communities to travel down that path as part of the Nationwide Health Information Network. Attendees also received glimpses into the efforts of frontline clinical research institutions such as Baylor College of Medicine and Georgetown University to implement caBIG™, and how caBIG™ tools and infrastructure are working to realize this 21st century vision of personalized medicine.
