Director's Note
In his book entitled "The World Is Flat", Thomas Friedman opined that interrelationships among countries have reached a point at which information exchange, by virtue of its immediacy, is no longer an option but a fact of life. Mr. Friedman wrote, "The lever that is enabling individuals and groups to go global so easily and so seamlessly is not horsepower, and not hardware, but software—all sorts of new applications—in conjunction with the creation of a global…network that has made us all next-door neighbors." Perhaps Mr. Friedman was thinking of caBIG® and its impact on how research is conducted?
June was filled with robust international exchanges.
Our colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and within the government of China, hosted a workshop in Beijing to advance collaborations between U.S. and Chinese institutions. A representative from the NCI Center for Bioinformatics and Information Technology presented on caBIG® capabilities to facilitate 21st-century clinical trials, and leaders from Duke University and Peking University shared news of their joint clinical research project that relies on caBIG® data interoperability, so that others might learn from and adapt their model.
Earlier in the month, I was welcomed by scientists at the National Cancer Center in Seoul, South Korea, who had invited me to share the story of the caBIG® initiative as a possible template for their efforts. Only a few days before, I lectured to fellow scientists at Bar-Ilan University in Israel on "Network-Centric Medicine" to demonstrate how the seamless caBIG®-enabled flow of information from clinical outcomes could accelerate research discoveries at the bench.
On this side of the "pond", NCI hosted our counterparts from the U.K. National Cancer Research Institute at our annual joint conference, Biomedical Informatics Without Borders. More than 200 individuals from seven countries convened to discuss both the technical and human resources needed to encourage and enable a culture of data sharing to expedite research and improve patient care. Within the space of just one hour at that event, I learned of efforts to apply caBIG® infrastructure in Pakistan, Australia, and The Netherlands (at the VU University Medical Center, it seems that caBIG® was chosen as the core IT infrastructure after a systematic review of possible choices)…as well as hearing about how the British have grappled with the challenges of creating a single, web-based point of access for researchers to search across hundreds of resources and data sets.
The caBIG® initiative was established to break down silos among individuals and institutions, and over the last several years we have seen momentum grow in this regard. Now, we are heartened to see the field of biomedicine entering the knowledge economy at an accelerating pace. "Round" or "flat", the globe is poised to use data more effectively against this killer disease.
Ken Buetow, Ph.D.
