Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has foundations in applied mathematics, chemistry, and genetics. It differs from biological computing, a subfield of computer engineering which uses bioengineering to build computers.
The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) supports basic research that increases understanding of biological processes and lays the foundation for advances in disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. NIGMS-funded scientists investigate how living systems work at a range of levels, from molecules and cells to tissues and organs, in research organisms, humans, and populations. Additionally, to ensure the vitality and continued productivity of the research enterprise, NIGMS provides leadership in training the next generation of scientists, in enhancing the diversity of the scientific workforce, and in developing research capacity throughout the country.
Health informatics is the field of science and engineering that aims at developing methods and technologies for the acquisition, processing, and study of patient data, which can come from different sources and modalities, such as electronic health records, diagnostic test results, medical scans. The health domain provides an extremely wide variety of problems that can be tackled using computational techniques.
The National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) is one of the institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The Biomedical Informatics Research Network, commonly referred among analysts as “BIRN” is a national proposed project to assist biomedical researchers in their bioscience investigations through data sharing and online collaborations. BIRN provides data-sharing infrastructure, advisory services from a single source and software tools and techniques. This national initiative is funded by NIH Grants, the National Center for Research Resources and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), a component of the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Neuroinformatics is the field that combines informatics and neuroscience. Neuroinformatics is related with neuroscience data and information processing by artificial neural networks. There are three main directions where neuroinformatics has to be applied:
The D-Grid Initiative was a government project to fund computer infrastructure for education and research (e-Science) in Germany. It uses the term grid computing. D-Grid started September 1, 2005 with six community projects and an integration project (DGI) as well as several partner projects.
The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), founded at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2000, is located in Bethesda, Maryland. It is one of 27 institutes and centers that are part of NIH, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Physiomics is a systematic study of physiome in biology. Physiomics employs bioinformatics to construct networks of physiological features that are associated with genes, proteins and their networks. A few of the methods for determining individual relationships between the DNA sequence and physiological function include metabolic pathway engineering and RNAi analysis. The relationships derived from methods such as these are organized and processed computationally to form distinct networks. Computer models use these experimentally determined networks to develop further predictions of gene function.
Biomedical Computation Review (BCR) is a quarterly, open-access magazine funded by the National Institutes of Health and published by the Mobilize Center at Stanford University. First published in 2005, BCR covers such topics as molecular dynamics, genomics, proteomics, physics-based simulation, systems biology, and other research involving computational biology. BCR's articles are targeted to those with a general science or biology background, in order to build a community among biomedical computational researchers who come from a variety of disciplines.
The Morgridge Institute for Research is a private, nonprofit biomedical research institute in Madison, Wis., affiliated with the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The institute works to improve human health by conducting, enabling and translating interdisciplinary biomedical research. Research in regenerative biology, virology, medical devices and core computational technology is currently underway.
Aviv Regev is a computational biologist and systems biologist and Executive Vice President and Head of Genentech Research and Early Development in Genentech/Roche. She is a core member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and professor at the Department of Biology of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Regev is a pioneer of single cell genomics and of computational and systems biology of gene regulatory circuits. She founded and leads the Human Cell Atlas project, together with Sarah Teichmann.
The White House BRAIN Initiative is a collaborative, public-private research initiative announced by the Obama administration on April 2, 2013, with the goal of supporting the development and application of innovative technologies that can create a dynamic understanding of brain function.
geWorkbench is an open-source software platform for integrated genomic data analysis. It is a desktop application written in the programming language Java. geWorkbench uses a component architecture. As of 2016, there are more than 70 plug-ins available, providing for the visualization and analysis of gene expression, sequence, and structure data.
Cathy H. Wu is the Edward G. Jefferson Chair and professor and director of the Center for Bioinformatics & Computational Biology (CBCB) at the University of Delaware. She is also the director of the Protein Information Resource (PIR) and the North east Bioinformatics Collaborative Steering Committee, and the adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Medical Center.
The Computational Biology Department (CBD) is a division within the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. It is located in the Gates-Hillman Center. Established in 2007 by Robert F. Murphy as the Lane Center for Computational Biology with funding from Raymond J. Lane and Stephanie Lane, CBD became a department within the School of Computer Science in 2016.
Ron Kikinis is an American physician and scientist best known for his research in the fields of imaging informatics, image guided surgery, and medical image computing. He is a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School. Kikinis is the founding director of the Surgical Planning Laboratory in the Department of Radiology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the vice-chair for Biomedical Informatics Research in the Department of Radiology.
John X. J. Zhang is a tenured professor at Thayer School of Engineering of Dartmouth College, and an investigator in the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Before joining Dartmouth, he was an associate professor with tenure in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas(UT Austin). He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University, California in 2004, and was a research scientist in systems biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before joining the faculty at UT Austin in 2005. Zhang is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and a recipient of the 2016 NIH Director's Transformative Research Award.
D. Lansing Taylor is the Director at the University of Pittsburgh Drug Discovery Institute (UPDDI), Pennsylvania and a faculty member in the Department of Computational and Systems Biology.
Biomedical data science is a multidisciplinary field which leverages large volumes of data to promote biomedical innovation and discovery. Biomedical data science draws from various fields including Biostatistics, Biomedical informatics, and machine learning, with the goal of understanding biological and medical data. It can be viewed as the study and application of data science to solve biomedical problems. Modern biomedical datasets often have specific features which make their analyses difficult, including:
