Bio21 Australia Ltd has initiated a new $3.32 million pilot project aimed at providing a platform for clinical and scientific research teams to access and share biotechnical and clinical data across multiple organizations. The project, called Molecular Medicine Informatics Model (MMIM), is supported by a grant of $1.66 million from the Victorian State Government's Bio21 STI program.
The project will link data-based genomics information with clinical patient information, allowing researchers to better understand how individuals' genomic characteristics affect the way in which they respond to a disease and to its various potential treatments.
Rapid advances in genomic, bio-informatics and information technology are transforming medical research, in terms of clinical studies and knowledge management. However, much of the necessary data for carrying out this research is fragmented and resides in standalone research and clinical data sets. There is ineffective utilization of public bioinformatics databases and no integration of clinical and genomic data sets. As a result, it is very difficult for researchers to determine how genomic characteristics affect disease response and treatment outcomes.
This project is one of the first in the world to tackle this problem. It will first focus on colorectal cancer, followed in Stage 2 by diabetes and epilepsy.
The project poses some major challenges for information technology. The health and biomedical research world is populated by highly autonomous organizations, each of which represents and organizes its data in different ways. The system to be developed must therefore be at the leading edge of computer technology. The system must be highly flexible, able to easily accommodate new organizations and heterogeneous data sets and interfaces. It must also respect emerging international standards for genomic and clinical data, and be designed to interoperate with a wide range of other health and research services, most of which can be expected to be developed independently. In addition, the issues of ethics, privacy, security and data ownership must be solved for a solution to have public and government acceptance.
The full implementation of such a system can be expected to provide substantial benefits to Victoria and to Australia. It will develop Victoria's capacity and attractiveness for biotechnology research, providing opportunities for growth in science and research infrastructure.
It will allow research hypotheses to be quickly and more cost-effectively tested across large data sets, leading to faster benefits for the community. If successful, it will provide the capacity to identify target components of new diagnostic tools and to identify and validate novel therapeutic targets. It could lead to pre-symptomatic testing of patients and early intervention based on genotype data and consequently improved healthcare outcomes.
The availability of such a platform could also help reverse Australia's brain drain and attract and retain leading researchers in Melbourne. And it could lead to the development of commercially exploitable intellectual property, both in healthcare and supporting information technology, suitable for export. The project will also increase the attractiveness of Victoria to the large pharmaceutical companies for clinical trials and related research.
The project is led by Melbourne Health and a team of world leading experts from some of Victoria's most prestigious institutes, including, Cancer Trials Australia, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Austin Health, Western Health, The Alfred Hospital, Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and The University of Melbourne.