External Collaborators

Health Sciences Libraries

NCIBI enjoys a unique relationship with the Health Sciences Libraries (HSL) at the University of Michigan and NCI-Frederick, facilitated by a bioinformationist.

As part of their HSL-NCIBI liaison role, bioinformationists offer NCIBI workshops and short courses at the University of Michigan campus and at the National Cancer Institute-Frederick. They also develop and disseminate instructional materials for long-term support of users.

Pilot Projects:

Historically Black Colleges and Universities Team Led by Dr. Raphael Isokepehi
A multi-university team led by Dr. Raphael Isokpehi of Jackson State University was selected as an NCIBI Pilot Project. The goal was to study the co-morbidity of substance abuse with Bipolar Disorder among African American women. This project consisted of three subprojects, each dealing with a different aspect of the general question:

Text Mining — Dr. Isokpehi and Dr. Wellington Ayensu of Jackson State University mined text for descriptions of treatments, health disparities, and molecular events.

Genes for Bipolar Disorder among African Americans — Dr. Sharon Lewis of Langston University prioritized genes for genotyping in the GAIN African American Bipolar Sample.

Estrogen and Substance Abuse — Dr. Tonya Gerald of North Carolina Central University studyied the molecular interplay between gender, Bipolar Disorder, and substance abuse.
The report from their project can be found here

Research Activities Underway at NCBCs:

i2b2-NCIBI Integration — A prototype has been developed for integrating NCIBI Tools into the i2b2 "Hive" framework, by linking NCIBI's Gene2Mesh database to ICD9 codes using MeSH categories as the link.

Biositemaps — NCIBI leads the Biositemaps resource inventory project in collaboration with NCBO, which has had significant impact on CTSA institutions as well.

Ongoing NCBC Working Groups — These include the Software and Data Integration Working Group(SDIWG), Ontologies Integration, and DBPs Collaboration.

Cytoscape Developer Community

NCIBI is a core developer within the Cytoscape Developer Community and will host the 2010 Cytoscape Consortium. NCIBI has also developed two modules for visualizing data and integrating with other tools (Metscape and the MiMI plugins).