The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will need a strong, interoperable data ecosystem to power its Bio Genesis Mission and accelerate biomedical research, according to Chris Kinsinger, NIH’s assistant director for catalytic data resources.
The Bio Genesis Mission is NIH’s contribution to the national Genesis Mission, which aims to build a future-ready, intelligent biomedical research ecosystem. NIH’s goal is to double the pace of biomedical innovation – from discovery to health impact – over the next five to 10 years with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).
Speaking at GovCIO’s Health IT Summit on Sept. 2, Kinsinger said reaching that goal will depend less on AI itself than on ensuring researchers can find, access, and use high-quality data. Much of that data is now scattered across NIH’s 27 institutes and centers, he said.
“There’s a lot of data infrastructure out there right now, but it’s really hard to find,” Kinsinger said. “There’s a number of places across the NIH where you might have a dozen or two dozen various data resources … we actually need to bring these data together.”
Kinsinger said effective data infrastructure should make resources both findable and interoperable through common standards and data models, even if those resources are not fully consolidated.
To address that challenge, Kinsinger said NIH brought together about 15 separate data resources through the Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE). The CFDE is organized around five centers that integrate data, resources, and knowledge from multiple Common Fund programs. The NIH Common Fund supports scientific programs that advance discovery across biomedical and behavioral research.
Building the CFDE, required NIH to establish common data standards and create shared search and knowledge portals, Kinsinger said. The participating resources had previously operated in silos and, in some cases, competed for the same funding awards.
“They realized, we’re on the same team now,” Kinsinger said.
NIH also built a cloud workspace that allows researchers to move computing resources closer to where data resides – a capability Kinsinger said will be essential to applying AI to health research.
“Folks using the data can bring their data to this cloud workspace” Kinsinger said. “That’s the sort of thing we’re going to need to power the Genesis Mission and the Bio Genesis Mission in order to apply AI to health research.”