Roadmap grant to provide interdisciplinary training to biomedical scientists

        Houston, December 15, 2006 – Research into genomics, proteomics and imaging generates vast amounts of biological data that need to be collected, stored and integrated. Such data have to be easily retrievable by biomedical investigators in order to generate new hypotheses for understanding the underlying biological processes that may lead to interventions against various types of human diseases.

          With a recent Roadmap grant initiative from the National Institutes of Health (http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/interdisciplinary/fundedresearch.asp), a consortium of five Houston education institutions led by Baylor College of Medicine plans to train a new breed of researchers to take the lead in this new paradigm of large scale, data-driven science. Other institutions involved include Rice University, the University of Houston, The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

          This training grant will be administered jointly by the Graduate Program in Structural and Computational Biology and Molecular Biology at Baylor College of Medicine and the Keck Center of the Gulf Coast Consortia including Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University, the University of Houston, The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, UT Medical School at Houston and UT Medical Branch at Galveston.

          “This shift in methods of information acquisition requires an interdisciplinary scientist who can understand the experiments that produce the data as well as methods for storing, accessing and extracting useful knowledge from the data sets” said Dr. Timothy Palzkill, the grant’s principal investigator and professor in the BCM department of molecular virology and microbiology.

          “In our training grant, the goal is to teach these new scientists how to handle large scale data sets and to use them to generate new biomedical discoveries,” said Palzkill.  “This was definitely a group effort from faculty at all the institutions and representing various disciplines from medicine, biochemistry, cell biology and genetics to computer science and statistics”.

          The estimated eight students in the program will come from various departments and Ph.D. programs in the five institutions, he said. If their research falls under the broad auspices of this grant, they can apply to be a trainee under it and receive NIH support for their studies. The grant is approximately for $1.6 million for a period of 4 years, said Palzkill.

           "This new grant brings an exciting new element into the Keck Center/GCC cadre of training grants," said Kathleen Matthews, dean of Rice's Wiess School of Natural Sciences. "The importance of extracting information from incredibly complex collections of data will be at the heart of the biology of the 21st Century. This program will focus on preparing both students and faculty to manage and understand the power and information inherent in these large-scale data sets."

          This training grant will lead to new curriculum development by the Graduate Program in Structural and Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics at Baylor College of Medicine. These courses will be jointly taught by the training faculty and students in any of the participating institutions can enroll in these courses. There are also other training mechanisms such as journal clubs, workshops and retreats to foster the interdisciplinary nature of the training. In addition, each trainee will be mentored by two faculty from different disciplines.

          Work such as that by Dr. Wah Chiu, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at BCM and director of the National Center for Macromolecular Imaging, pointed the way to the need for scientists who can manipulate large amounts of molecular imaging data and extract from it discoveries on structure and function relationships, said Palzkill. The large amount of data generated by the Baylor Human Genome Sequencing Center in efforts to understand genetic diseases also spotlighted the need for this training program, he said.

          Chiu is a member of the grant’s steering committee and understands the value of this kind of research. “We hope to train scientists for this exciting new future in biomedical science which is driven by vast amounts of quantitative observations of various types,” he said. “More and more, this kind of expertise is needed to identify new ideas and generate new concepts in translational medicine.  We are particularly pleased that we are among the 6 academic institutions to win this award in a highly competitive application process.”

          A total of 32 faculty from the five institutions are mentors in the program. Palzkill said plans are underway to begin student recruitment soon.