Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside

Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside

Center URL: http://www.partners.org/i2b2
PI: Isaac Kohane, M.D., Ph.D.
PI Institution: Brigham and Women's Hospital

NIH Program Officer (PO): Valerie Florance (NLM)
NIH Lead Science Officer (LSO): Valentina Di Francesco (NIAID)
NIH Science Officers (SO): Vivien Bonazzi (NHGRI), Rochelle Long (NIGMS), James Luo (NIBIB), Dina Paltoo (NHLBI), Joni Rutter (NIDA)

ID: 1-U54-LM008748

i2b2 Summary: How can we use the informational by-products of the healthcare system for discovery research in the genomic era? Can we make every patient's healthcare encounter maximize the progress of medicine? Informatics for Integrating Bench and the Bedside (i2b2) is designed to answer these questions affirmatively by providing a suite of tools, methods and vivid examples for use, particularly in large healthcare systems to enable population-based, genomically-augmented measurements across these systems. These solutions include a free and open source set of tools, collectively known as the i2b2 Hive, that enable "natural language processing" of the text in medical records to provide automated characterization of thousands of patients, that automatically remove identifying data to protect patient privacy, and that allow obtaining thousands of DNA samples per week for genome-wide studies. The methodologies range from novel predictive methods to determine how much more information, relative to conventional clinical measures, can be reliably obtained from genomic studies to organizational methods to efficiently manage the regulatory challenges of multi-institutional research. I2b2’s initial disease foci include: finding predictive genomic markers for asthma exacerbations, gene expression signatures to improve diabetic management, genomic markers to refine the classification of hypertension, and expression signatures to measure the efficacy of potential therapies for Huntington’s Disease.