NIH invests $32 million in new big data initiative

The National Institutes of Health announced Thursday grants of $32 million in fiscal 2014 to 12 new centers created to work on surmounting healthcare research challenges in working with increasingly complex biomedical data sets.

The Scripps Translational Science Institute and the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, Calif., combined received roughly $4.4 million over four years. The NIH has also founded centers based at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Stanford University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of California, Santa Cruz, Harvard University Medical Center, the University of Memphis and the University of Southern California.

Scripps institutes will partner with UCLA. The hope is that the center will create resources that allow researchers to share data for analytical use. The goal is to foster greater sharing and collaboration.

“The scientific community can build off of this centralized database instead of having everyone reinventing the wheel,” said Andrew Su, a professor at the Scripps Research Institute and a co-director at the new center.

If funding permits, the NIH hopes to invest $656 million in the centers through 2020.

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