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An Invitation to Submit from the Scientific Program Committee Chair
Atul Butte, MD, PhD Atul Butte, MD, PhD
Chair, Scientific Program Committee
Dear Colleagues:
In 2005, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine:
"It is the responsibility of those of us involved in today's biomedical research enterprise to translate the remarkable scientific innovations we are witnessing into health gains for the nation... At no other time has the need for a robust, bidirectional information flow between basic and translational scientists been so necessary."
In that publication, Dr. Zerhouni introduced his ideas to re-engineer the way clinical research was performed in the United States. With the doubling of the NIH budget in the past decade, and coincident completion of the Human Genome Project, there is a perceived need to translate products of the genome era into products for clinical care. The push to reinvent clinical research culminated in the release of the NIH Roadmap Request for Applications (RFA) for Institutional Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA). Twelve academic health centers were awarded during the first round of funding. Clearly evident in Dr. Zerhouni's quote is the role biomedical informatics needs to play in facilitating translational medicine. Indeed, the RFA for the CTSA itself mentions the term "informatics" more than thirty times.
The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) recently added Translational Bioinformatics as one of its three major domains of informatics. AMIA defines Translational Bioinformatics as:
"ㅤㄲㅞㄼhe development of storage, analytic, and interpretive methods to optimize the transformation of increasingly voluminous biomedical data into proactive, predictive, preventative, and participatory health. Translational bioinformatics includes research on the development of novel techniques for the integration of biological and clinical data and the evolution of clinical informatics methodology to encompass biological observations. The end product of translational bioinformatics is newly found knowledge from these integrative efforts that can be disseminated to a variety of stakeholders, including biomedical scientists, clinicians, and patients."
While the call for translational bioinformaticians was issued by none other than the Director of the NIH, and while translational bioinformatics is now one of AMIA's major domains of informatics, currently there is no national annual conference or symposium for the presentation and discussion of research work in Translational Bioinformatics.
This will change in 2008 with the inaugural Summit on Translational Bioinformatics conducted by the American Medical Informatics Association. We will leverage AMIA's proficiency in managing large events, but I can also promise the dissemination and sharing of knowledge at this event will in many ways look unlike a traditional AMIA meeting with the presentation of research showcasing the synergy between the medical informatics and bioinformatics communities. While we anticipate that non-research issues relating to translational bioinformatics and clinical research informatics will be a continuing part of the Spring Congress and Annual Symposium, the deficiency exists for an American conference covering the entire domain of bioinformatics and computational biology. Here we endeavor to hold a summit covering the more specific and tractable need of Translational Bioinformatics, which is more directly relevant to the interests of AMIA.
I would like to invite the submission of manuscripts including scientific papers, posters, and panels. The specifications for each category follow. The deadline for submission is Monday, September 17, 2007. We will publish a Proceedings of the summit and will upload the accepted peer-reviewed papers into PubMedCentral.
I do hope you will save the dates of March 12-15, 2008 and plan to travel to San Francisco, California, to attend what we believe will be the first of many meetings with a singular focus on translational bioinformatics.
Sincerely,
Atul Butte, MD, PhD
Chair, Scientific Program Committee
Assistant Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine
Director, Center for Pediatric Bioinformatics, Lucile Packard Children's Hospital
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