Melbourne medical informatics group nets $4.4m in grant round

The Bio21 Molecular Medicine Informatics Model (Bio21:MMIM) is one of nine projects to share $19.4 million in recent funding from the Australian government under the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative (SII).

Bio21:MMIM will receive $4.4 million, the largest grant given in this round of funding.

The Bio21:MMIM project allows medical researchers to link and map clinical and genetic data from over 80,000 records, held in various institutions, across common diseases such as epilepsy, diabetes and colorectal cancer.

The first stage of Bio21:MMIM created a virtual community by integrating data and information from seven institutions: Melbourne Health, Western Hospital, Austin Hospital, Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute, The Alfred Hospital, Ludwig Cancer Research Institution and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI).

The project is conducted under the auspices of the University of Melbourne and is led by Melbourne Health in partnership with the Victorian Partnership of Advanced Computing.

"Nobody before has put together something like this successfully. This involved getting a lot of disparate organisations to agree to work together," said Stella Clark, CEO Bio21 Australia Ltd.

"It demonstrates exactly what we wanted to achieve through the Bio21 cluster model -- that we could manage a very complex project across organisational boundaries. It really validates for us our method of working together."

Bio21:MMIM authorised users and researchers can search, access and query source data, published papers and data sets allowing them to identify factors, or combinations of factors, to predict treatment outcomes and identify drug responses. Data is extracted nightly from all of the source databases where it is mapped into the Bio21:MMIM local repositories.

"When a researcher asks a query, the federated data integrator pools the results out of the various local research repositories, so organisations do not have to transfer their data to anybody else," said Clark. "They own and manage it themselves. The federated data integrator simply has access to that in an IT sense, to pull data out when there's a question raised."

Authorised researchers can access the data electronically from their desktops if they have ethics approval for the question they are asking, she said.

The additional funding from the federal government will increase the amount and variety of data in these current diseases, but will also extend the platform into new related common diseases to include multiple sclerosis, stroke, Parkinson's disease, prostate cancer, asthma and diabetes.

The funding may also allow this clinical information to be linked to image data collected on patients, such as PET (positron emission tomography) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans.

New partners in the project will be Monash University, St Vincent's Hospital, Menzies Centre for Population Research and Royal Hobart Hospital in Tasmania, the Royal Children's Hospital and Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Neurosciences Victoria as well as the Cabrini, Epworth and Freemasons Hospitals.

Bio21:MMIM was established as a pilot project with a $1.66 million Science, Technology and Innovation grant from the Victorian government which was matched with an equivalent level of in-kind support from participating members.

Other projects to receive SII funding included BlueNet, the Australian Marine Science Data Network (University of Tasmania, $3,548,000).