New center to provide improved data analysis resource for BCM scientists

HOUSTON -- (August 2, 2011) -- A new center at Baylor College of
Medicine will create a more efficient, centralized resource for students
and faculty members to analyze high-throughput data sets, such as human
genome data, to solve complex problems in biomedical research and advance
personalized medicine.

Directed by Dr. Olivier Lichtarge, a professor of molecular and human
genetics at BCM, the Computational and Integrative Biomedical Research
(CIBR) Center will bring together experts in biology, medicine,
mathematics and computer science.
Tailor our approach

"Leadership in disease prevention and patient therapy is increasingly
dependent on how well we can sift through data to recognize complex
biomarkers of disease," said Dr. Paul Klotman, president and CEO of BCM.
"The CIBR Center will give us a unique opportunity to ask the right
questions and use the answers to tailor our approach to each patient more
finely."

Lichtarge said a major goal of the new center is to foster collaborations
between physicians, biologists and computational scientists across Baylor
and across the Texas Medical Center.
Enhance research capabilities

"A growing challenge in all areas of biomedical research is to integrate
massive amounts of molecular and genetic data with the individual
features of diseases and of their response to drugs. This requires a
concerted effort to distribute current computational tools widely and
also to create the conditions for inventing a new generation of
biological and medical algorithms."

As the availability of these types of data increases, the CIBR Center
will serve as an important tool to further BCMâ€™s research capabilities.

"It will allow our scientists to take advantage of high-throughput
biological data and put traditional hypothesis-driven research in its
greater genomics context," said Lichtarge.

For example, from data to models and from models to therapies, we will
need to invent new methods for pattern recognition, classification,
functional inferences, heuristics, machine learning and developing
equations and models, he said.

The center is open to all members of the Texas Medical Center, and of the
greater Houston research community.

