NIH Focus on Biomedical Computing

By Lisa Thompson

A National Institutes of Health (NIH) panel has called on the agency to establish a Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative to expand research in biomedical computing and train a new generation of researchers. Formed last year by NIH Director Harold Varmus, the Working Group on Biomedical Computing found that the growing convergences in biomedicine and computation necessitate increased attention by the agency.

The NIH initiative will likely become part of the broader Information Technology for the Twenty-First Century initiative. The FY 2000 budget proposal for the initiative includes only $6 million for NIH, which many criticized as being too low. The Administration described the figure as merely a placeholder, anticipating an increase after the NIH had a chance to consider the Working Group's report.

The report offers four recommendations:

1. The NIH should establish between five and twenty National Programs of Excellence in Biomedical Computing devoted to all facets of this emerging discipline, from the basic research to the tools to do the work. It is the expectation that those National Programs will play a major role in educating biomedical-computation researchers.

2. To make the growing body of biological data available in a form suitable for study and use, the NIH should establish a new program directed toward the principles and practice of information storage, curation, analysis, and retrieval (ISCAR).

3. The NIH should provide additional resources and incentives for basic research (through R01 grants) to provide adequate support for those who are inventing, refining, and applying the tools of biomedical computing. [RO1 grants are the standard individual investigator awards at NIH.]

4. The NIH should foster a scalable national computer infrastructure. To assure that biomedical researchers can gain access to the computing resources they need beyond their desktops, the NIH should provide financial resources to increase computing capacity, both local and remote. The purpose of this recommendation is to establish a balanced infrastructure for all computational needs.

Some of the research areas identified by the initiative include surgery, neurobiology, medical genetics, rational drug design at the cellular level, cell biology, software development, algorithms, and databases.

The NIH has long been Congress's pet research agency, the recipient of substantial funding increases in recent years and subject of legislative attempts to double its budget over the next five years. In FY 2000, the agency could see as much as $2 billion added to its currently $15.6 billion budget, enough, one would think, to begin supporting a reasonable biomedical computing program.

The working group's report on the Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative can be found on the NIH website at: http://www.nih.gov/welcome/director/060399.htm.