The National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics (NCIBI) is one of seven National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBC) within the NIH Roadmap. The NCBC program is focused on building a universal computing infrastructure designed to speed progress in biomedical research. NCIBI was founded in September 2005 and is based at the University of Michigan as part of the U-M Center for Computational Medicine and Biology (CCMB).

Led jointly by teams of computational and biomedical scientists, NCIBI:

Integrates vast amounts of diverse, multi-scale data and derived knowledge, including context-appropriate molecular biology information from emerging experimental data; gene, protein, and metabolite databases; and the published literature.

Collaborates to determine how these data sets can best be represented and developed into resources that will advance research and facilitate biomedical discoveries.

Creates relevant tools for analytically exploring the data to uncover and validate functional associations and possible causal and conditional relationships involved in mechanisms of complex physiological processes or diseases.

Develops an array of tutorials, seminars, documentation, and other training materials to assure both the usability and usefulness of NCIBI tools.

Disseminates discoveries and processes to biomedical communities worldwide through publications, presentations, national partnerships and collaborators, and e-networking initiatives such as an RSS feed and the NCIBI gateway.

News

NCIBI researchers discover new fusion gene related to lung cancer
NIH, the NephCure Foundation and U of M support kidney study

New Tools and Services

Now available: NCIBI Natural Language Processing Web Service for parsing and tagging text from the National Library of Medicine's PubMed literature database

Now available: APIs for the following resources:

Gene2MeSH: http://gene2mesh.ncibi.org/about.html#programmatic

NLP: http://nlp.ncibi.org/about.html

Upcoming Events

NCIBI presentations at American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Summits on Translational Bioinformatics and on Clinical Research Informatics - March 10-13, 2010, San Francisco

Cytoscape and MiMI Plugin Workshop, Health Sciences Library, Ann Arbor, MI - March 17, 2010

NCIBI 5th Annual Research Meeting, Ann Arbor, MI - April 20-21, 2010

Cytoscape Consortium Summer Retreat, Ann Arbor, MI - Late July 2010 (specific dates TBD)

RCMI Summer Workshop, Ann Arbor, MI - Late July 2010 (specific dates TBD)

Recent Programs and Presentations

AACR Special Conference on Cancer Epigenetics - San Juan, Puerto Rico - January 20-23, 2010, Combined approach using the Illumina Infinium methylation27 beadarray and Affymetrix tiling chip set: Preliminary results illustrate methylation differences in HPV(+) and HPV(-) head and neck cancers (Maureen Sartor)

Rocky Mountain Bioinformatics Conference - keynote presentation, Strategies for Elaborating Cognitive Requirements of Bioinformatics Tools - December 2009

World Congress of Proteomics, Human Proteom Organization (HUPO) - September 25-30, 2009
- Alternative Splice Variants in Cancers (Rajasree Menon)
- Metscape Tool for Visualizing Metabolomics (All Karnovsky)

Presentations and Videos: NCIBI/RCMI Workshop on Translational Bioinformatics - July 2009

Publications

ConceptGen: A Gene Set Enrichment and Gene Set Relation Mapping Tool , Sartor MA, Mahavisno V, Keshamouni VG, Cavalcoli J, et al. (Bioinformatics, Advanced Access, December 9, 2009)

GAGE: Generally Applicable Gene Set Enrichment for Pathway Analysis, Luo W, Friedman MS, Shedden K, Hankenson KD, Woolf PJ (BMC Bioinformatics)

Cross-Domain Neurobiology Data Integration and Exploration, Xuan W, Dai M, Buckner J, Mirel B, Song J, Dong H, Athey B, Watson SJ, Meng F. (IJCBS 2009, In press)