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The primary goal of the Research Informatics Shared Resource is to support research within the Cancer Center through the delivery of software applications to serve clinical, basic, and population science research.
The resource was created in 1995 and comprised the many aspects of IT including infrastructure and network support. In early 2006 the core was restructured and the IT infrastructure was put under the Computer And Technology Group. Research Informatics now reports directly to the Senior Director of Laboratory Research. This re-alignment puts the resource in the center of supporting the varying Institutional research needs, while continuing to work closely with the various other technology groups.
The Research Informatics Shared Resource is comprised of a staff of 12 software engineers and database administrator with backgrounds mainly in computer science and medical informatics.
Since its inception the resource has collaborated with program leaders and core facilities to produce software and database applications to support and move the research forward by providing more timely data with improved quality.
The team has developed various systems primarily focused on clinical research, biospecimen tracking, high throughput data management and annotation, and genomic data collections with enhanced analysis facilities. The systems are built as commercial quality software products, utilizing industry best practices for software analysis, design, development and implementation.
In collaboration with the multidisciplinary teams, the Resource Director, Samir Courdy proposed a clinical research application for tracking cancer patients in the many groups that can be integrated with the clinical care systems (Cerner) to provide a mechanism for identifying patients that can be recruited more readily into studies. The proposal was approved and the Cancer Clinical Research (CCR) system is in its third year and encompasses all thirteen multidisciplinary teams including the Fitness and Wellness group. During this period it has grown to a total of 10,000 patients. This system is highly integrated with the clinical data housed in the Health Sciences Electronic Data Warehouse, as well as a Biospecimen Tracking System (BST) that was built in collaboration with Dr. Philip Bernard and deployed in 2003. It currently tracks over 40000 samples.
A Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) for the Microarray Core Facility was created to address workflow and improve efficiency of experiment processing within the facility. This system, GNomEx, also supports the access to the analyzed datasets and analysis suite integrated with the Integrated Genome Browser (IGB) and the Distributed Annotation System (DAS2). This work was done in collaboration with Dr. David Nix co-director of the Bioinformatics Shared Resource.
The resource collaborated with the the Cancer Control and Population Sciences Program to co-develop the Utah Population Database (UPDB), a highly complex application and database system used to manage over 11 million records of diverse sources of population relevant data, including familial and genealogic data, birth and death records, Utah Cancer Registry, and Drivers License records to name a few. Currently the resource is collaborating with the same team to design and develop a query tool for a de-identified subset of the UPDB that can support pre-study hypothesis generation. This query tool will be known as UPDBL and its release date is set for June 2009. Several new features and enhancements to this query tools are scheduled for FY10.
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