UC San Diego to Help Develop Cardiovascular Research Grid for Linking Heart Researchers

March 9, 2007 / By Skip Cynar, 858-822-0738, cynar@ucsd.edu

Federally Funded Project Will Allow International Access to Cardiovascular Medical Data

San Diego, CA, March 9, 2007 -- UCSD's Center for Research in Biological Systems (CRBS) and researchers from two other leading universities were awarded an $8.5 million federal grant to deploy a digital network to foster the rapid exchange of expertise and data on heart-related illnesses among institutions worldwide. Named the Cardiovascular Research Grid, this multi-institutional effort will provide biomedical researchers with advanced software tools and collaboration-enabling technologies to accelerate the pace of research on life-threatening cardiac ailments and the development of new treatments.

CRBS director Mark Ellisman (right) with Calit2 director Larry Smarr in front of tiled visualization display. Calit2 houses 30 of CRBS's approximately 100 personnel, including the center's administrative officers, executive director Steve Peltier and management services officer Lori Guardiano-Durkin. Other groups located on the third floor of Atkinson Hall: John Wooley's Joint Center for Structural Genomics and some of Peter Arzberger's National Biomedical Computational Resource group, Maryann Martone's Cell Center Database component, and most of the Telescience group.

To launch this effort, the National Institutes of Health's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), approved a four-year, $8.5 million grant beginning March 1. Key biomedical researchers at CRBS and Ohio State University's Department of Biomedical Informatics are collaborating with colleagues at the Institute for Computational Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, where the digital project will be based.

"Developing and deploying cyberinfrastructure to capitalize on emerging technologies to promote better collaboration and accelerate research is a core focus of our Center's efforts," said CRBS Director Mark Ellisman, a professor of medicine and adjunct professor of bioengineering. "With a track record of developing scalable cyberinfrastructure to foster interdisciplinary investigations among teams of researchers in microscopy, neuroimaging, and the environmental health sciences, CRBS is excited about this new opportunity to work closely with researchers at Johns Hopkins and Ohio State on developing the Cardiovascular Research Grid."

Ellisman directs the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR), where the cyberinfrastructure permitting customizable Web-base research environments emerged from early efforts to remotely control some of the most sophisticated experimental research instruments in the world. It rapidly became apparent that the ability to remotely acquire data from high-energy electron microscopes -- telemicroscopy -- also required close coupling with supercomputers and very large data storage resources. This need led to the development of "Telescience" (http://telescience.ucsd.edu/), and its grid-based architecture has since served as a springboard for several large-scale national projects, including the NIH-funded Biomedical Informatics Research Network (http://nbirn.net/ ) and Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (http://camera.calit2.net/ ), led by Calit2 and funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

In the fall of 2005, CRBS's customizable, Web-based research architecture was utilized for the National Institute of Environmental Health Science's Hurricane Response Portal (http://www-apps.niehs.nih.gov/katrina/ ), where it powered an interactive, user-friendly, Web-based GIS portal to integrate existing, publicly available spatial data with disaster-specific data sets.

"We're looking forward to collaboratively implementing an infrastructure that will effectively pool the diverse expertise, applications, and instrumentation of the cardiovascular research community into a unified knowledge base -- one that will enable researchers to tackle cardiac disease studies of greater scope and complexity," said Ellisman.

The Cardiovascular Research Grid will begin to invite the leading experts in the world to develop projects and task forces that focus on common problems, regardless of their location. The project teams will drive the development of open, Web-based software tools that all research groups connected to the grid can use and share. When research nodes are connected to the grid, clinicians and researchers will be able to access and share experimental data, data analysis tools and computational models relating to cardiac function in health and disease. Patient privacy will be protected, as individual data will not carry information identifying patients from whom they were obtained.

In deciding to fund the new grid, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute recognized the important contribution that bioinformatics can now make in developing a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of heart disease as well as the development of new therapeutic approaches.

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UC San Diego to Help Develop Cardiovascular Research Grid for Linking Heart Researchers