Description:
045 Database Resources Integration
Fast-Track proposals will not be accepted
Direct-to-phase II proposals will be accepted
Number of anticipated awards: 1-2
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Budget (total costs):
Phase I: $225,000 for up to 1 year
Phase II: $1,500,000 for up to 3 years.
Background:
The NIAID Division of Allergy, Immunology, and Transplantation (DAIT) has funded the following bioinformatics resources to meet the needs of immunology research community for data sharing, knowledge dissemination, standard development and integrative analyses:
• ImmPort (https://immport.niaid.nih.gov/): a unique resource primarily for public data sharing of immunological studies funded by DAIT
• ImmuneSpace (https://www.immunespace.org/): a data management and analysis platform where datasets from the Human Immunology Project Consortium (HIPC) program can be easily explored and analyzed using state-of-the-art computational tools
• ITN TrialShare (https://www.itntrialshare.org/): a web portal of the Immune Tolerance Network (ITN) that shares information about ITN’s clinical studies and specimen, as well as data and analysis code underlying the consortium’s publications
• IEDB (http://www.iedb.org/): a bioinformatics resource that offers easy searching of experimental data characterizing antibody and T cell epitopes, including epitopes involved in infectious disease, allergy, autoimmunity, and transplant, studied in humans, non-human primates, and other animal species. It also hosts tools for epitope analyses
• ImmGen (https://www.immgen.org/): a public resource that provides a complete microarray analysis of gene expression and regulation in the immune system of the mouse
While the data, knowledge and tools provided by these resources have been serving the research community well, there is a growing need for a search and retrieval system (e.g., NCBI Entrez, Google-like interface) that enables integrated access to these resources. The development of such system, supplemented with a set of data integration standards and tools, will position the research community to better utilize existing databases for immunology research.
Project Goal
The goal of this project is to support the development of a data retrieval and discovery system for integrated access to DAIT funded bioinformatics resource for data query, knowledge dissemination and integrative analyses.
Phase I Activities
Phase I activities should focus on providing evidence that bioinformatics methods have been developed effectively and can be applied to the data, information, knowledge and tools across the identified DAIT database resources. The offeror may choose to perform the following:
1. Prototyping an integrated retrieval system that has a user interface to enable searching of the identified databases. The system should support text searching using simple Boolean queries, downloading of data in various formats and linking of data, information and tools between these databases based on inferred relationships.
2. Implementation of data and metadata standards to facilitate the transformation and integration of data from the identified databases into analyzable datasets for immune modeling and biomarker prediction.
3. Implementation of bioinformatics pipelines to enable interoperation of data and tools of these databases.
Phase II Activities
Extend Phase I to include the following:
1. Production implementation of the bioinformatics systems prototyped during Phase I.
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2. Add functionalities and capacities of these systems based on research community’s needs.
3. Integration of more public databases relevant to immunology research.
4. Adoption of new integrative tools to support discovery and validation of biomarkers across multiple types of molecular data, clinical phenotypes, animal and cell line models.
This SBIR will not support:
The design and implementation of a data warehouse.
