The National Institute of Health (NIH) has announced an initial investment of nearly $32 million for NIH’s Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative which is projected to have a total investment of nearly $656 million through 2020. The BD2K initiative, launched in 2013, is a trans-NIH program that will develop new strategies to analyze and leverage the explosion of increasingly complex biomedical data sets, referred to as Big Data.
Currently, biomedical data generation is exceeding researchers’ ability to capitalize on all the available data. The BD2K awards will support the development of new approaches, software, tools, and training programs to improve access to these data and the ability to make new discoveries using them. Investigators hope to explore novel analytics to mine large amounts of data, for eventual application to improving human health. Examples include an improved ability to predict who is at increased risk for breast cancer, heart attack and other diseases and condition, and better ways to treat and prevent them.
The four main components of the new BD2K awards are:
- Centers of Excellence for Big Data Computing.
- BD2K-LINCS Perturbation Data Coordination and Integration Center.
- BD2K Data Discovery Index Coordination Consortium (DDICC).
- Training and Workforce Development.
For additional information, see the NIH press release.