SCRIPPS RESEARCHER TO CO-LEAD ‘BIG DATA’ CENTER

By U-T San Diego, October 14, 2014

Former San Diego ARCS Scholar Andrew Su at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla has been named co-director of a new center to apply the growing torrent of “big data” to complex biological problems.

The Center for Excellence for Big Data Computing at UCLA is one of 12 related centers just announced by the National Institutes of Health. Each site will tackle a specific challenge in data management and interpretation.

San Diego researchers are getting more than $4.4 million from the agency’s “Big Data to Knowledge” initiative under the UCLA center grant. Scripps Research will receive about $3.8 million, while more than $600,000 will go to the Scripps Translational Science Institute, a joint venture of Scripps Research and the Scripps Health network.

The NIH is awarding nearly $32 million to the entire 12-center venture. It intends to spend nearly $656 million by 2020 on the initiative, if funding remains available.

Leaders of the UCLA-based center are Peipei Ping, a cardiology researcher at that school; Su, an associate professor in Scripps Research’s molecular and experimental medicine department; and Henning Hermjakob of the European Bioinformatics Institute. Scripps Health cardiologist and genomics expert Eric Topol is also part of the collaborative.

Su’s goal is to help bring scientists and the public together to work on nagging health care problems, in part by open distribution of data that traditionally has been kept secret.

The new project “will also accelerate one of his lab’s research efforts to create a ‘citizen science’ platform to organize biomedical knowledge,” Scripps Research said in a news release.

The UCLA-based center plans to use data from the Scripps Wellderly Genome Resource, a set of DNA data from a study that Topol has been overseeing. All participants in that study have lived for at least 80 years without developing any chronic disease.

Overall, “Big Data to Knowledge” is an attempt to help biologists make better sense of the increasingly voluminous amount of information generated in their field, a trend fueled partly by ever-more sophisticated technology that can yield greater data in shorter periods of time.

“The future of biomedical research is about assimilating data across biological scales, from molecules to populations,” Philip Bourne, associate director of data science for the NIH, said in a statement.