IC Directors’ Meeting Highlights — Thursday, October 12, 2017

Announcements

Dr. Collins shared that he would be leading a discussion at an event honoring Louis Stokes today.  Dr. Collins also announced that NIH will partner with 11 leading biopharmaceutical companies to launch the Partnership for Accelerating Cancer Therapies (PACT), a five-year public-private research collaboration totaling $215 million as part of the Cancer Moonshot.  PACT will initially focus on efforts to identify, develop and validate robust biomarkers — standardized biological markers of disease and treatment response — to advance new immunotherapy treatments that harness the immune system to attack cancer.  The partnership will be managed by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health with the Food and Drug Administration serving in an advisory role.

National Library of Medicine Strategic Plan

Dr. Patti Brennan, Director, National Library of Medicine (NLM), presented on the National Library of Medicine Strategic Plan, which will include four themes:

1. Role of NLM in advancing data science, open science, and biomedical informatics

2. Role of NLM in advancing biomedical discovery and translational science

3. Role of the NLM in supporting the public's health: clinical systems, public health systems and services, and personal health
4. Role of NLM in building collections to support discovery and health in the 21st century

In addition, the Plan incorporates several cross-cutting topical threads, including: standards, partnerships, user communities, user engagement and education outreach, international engagement, health disparities, computing infrastructure, physical plant infrastructure, research needs and funding, and workforce development.

Scientific Data Council Vision for Biomedical Data Resource Ecosystem

Dr. Jon Lorsch, Director, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and Dr. Steve Katz, National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, presented on NIH’s effort to modernize the NIH-funded biomedical data resource ecosystem. The main proposal for this effort is to have separate support for databases, knowledgebases, and tool development; and to develop new grant mechanism templates.

Proposal for Storing Human Reads and Other Large Data Sets

Dr. James Ostell, Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, and Dr. Stephen Sherry, Staff Scientist, presented on Modest Proposal to Support Access to Human Reads in the Cloud.  This effort would allow existing NIH policy, procedures, and software to be used for non-PI data access requests for human reads in the cloud and supports access to existing cloud resources using their own authentication systems.

Data Commons Pilot

Dr. Betsy Wilder, Director, Office of Strategic Coordination, and Dr. Vivien Bonazzi, Program Specialist, presented on the Data Commons pilot project, which would allow access, use, and sharing of large, high-value NIH data in the cloud.