One of the big new technologies in biomedical science is the use of genome sequencing, which allows scientists to decipher and map the DNA of all kinds of organisms and diseases. This technology has produced massive amounts of data, but the pace of data generation has largely outstripped researchers’ ability to make sense of the results.
The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) has launched a multiyear effort to develop a Biomedical Data Translator that integrates multiple types of existing data sources, including signs and symptoms of disease, drug effects, and biological data relevant to understanding disease.
In the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the Carlson College of Veterinary Medicine, Dr. Stephen Ramsey was recently awarded funding to work on the NCATS project. “We’re funded to build a software tool for mining biomedical knowledge-bases, and for reasoning based on information from these knowledge-bases. We hope the final product will be able to answer questions (expressed in natural language) such as “what genetic conditions might be protective against osteoporosis” or “how does fenbendazole reduce parasite load?”. The award of $437, 000 is the first of two phases of funding.
The project is a collaboration between OSU, the Institute for Systems Biology, and Ohio State University.
