Long Term Collaboration between Windber Research Institute and IDBS Yields Major Impacts on Breast Cancer Care and Understanding

Research on Data Management for Translational Research Published in The Journal of Biomedical Informatics

Windber, Penn., Guildford, UK, and Burlington, Mass., December 15, 2011 - The Windber Research Institute (WRI), a not-for-profit research institute which undertakes pioneering research with programs focusing on breast cancer, gynecological disease, cardiovascular disease, health promotion and disease prevention, and IDBS, a global provider of innovative enterprise data management, analytics and modeling solutions, today announced a publication in the current (December, 2011) issue of The Journal of Biomedical Informatics. The joint paper, "DW4TR: A Data Warehouse for Translational Research," illustrates the successful collaborative development of a novel informatics system for researching breast cancer causes and its treatments. 

Integrating all the data acquired from multiple platforms and making them usable at the point-of-need is critical to the success of translational research, and this is an important field of research and development in biomedical informatics. There are many challenges in developing a comprehensive data warehouse system to meet the needs of translational research including the importance of handling temporal information, and the paper describes, from the data model to the interface, a novel system that meets those challenges.

Working with Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, WRI and IDBS created a comprehensive data warehouse comprised of a complex set of approximately 1,000 detailed breast cancer attributes, including risk factors, patient history, pathology, and treatment. With all these clinico-pathological data now available in a single source, scientists can query across the information to support multiple research goals, whether for translational medicine, or clinical risk assessment.

"We are fortunate to have forged a multi-disciplinary team of clinicians, scientists, software developers, and biomedical informaticians to meet the data gathering and analysis challenges," said Dr. Hai Hu, the Sr. Director of Biomedical Informatics and Deputy Chief Scientific Officer at WRI, who led the project. "We began by focusing on a concrete translational research project, the Clinical Breast Care Project, headed by Col. Craig D. Shriver, M.D., of the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The whole data model, including the main patient-centric clinical data model, was developed at WRI to be flexible and expandable to accommodate the dynamic nature of translational research. We have also tested this model using additional disease entities. The temporal data model is effective, and the interfaces target general users including clinicians and lab scientists. The software development and implementation was done by InforSense, now part of IDBS."

"The project is the result of a very successful collaboration between a research institute and a software company. WRI was the genesis of the system from the user requirements perspective, but we were also able to incorporate ideas from a number of other research centers in developing the system," said Mr. Mick Correll, an author of the paper and currently an Associate Director of the Center for Cancer Computational Biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. "We are happy that this collaboration has led to a successful software system and also, with this publication, that we were able to demonstrate the academic value of the system."

A leading expert in biomedical informatics, Dr. J. Robert Beck, M.D., Senior Vice President, Chief Academic Officer, and Chief Medical Officer of Fox Chase Cancer Center, commented: "As a member of the Scientific Advisory Board to the Clinical Breast Care Project, I have observed the evolution of the Data Warehouse for Translational Research (DW4TR) over the past five years. DW4TR exemplifies a user-centered data system design, employs standard tools and architecture, and has already been successfully exported to a second clinical domain."

"Designing and implementing the system posed a number of engineering challenges. It borrowed many concepts from traditional business intelligence projects, but applying those methods effectively to longitudinal clinical data required fresh thinking from both a data modeling and user interface perspective," said Dr. Paul Denny-Gouldson, Vice President of Translational Medicine at IDBS. "Our long term relationship with Windber has been instrumental in the development of our solutions for translational medicine. IDBS continues to collaborate with Windber to deliver better understanding of complex scientific data to create personalized therapies and improve patient outcomes."

About WRI

Windber Research Institute (WRI) is a private, non-profit biomedical research institute focused on issues of women's health and cardiovascular disease. The Institute is organized around technology-based platforms and research programs reflecting best practices from academia as well as pharmaceutical and biotechnology research groups. These technology platforms include Tissue Repository, Biomedical Informatics, Genomics and Cell Culture. WRI has worked closely with its partners to develop an integrated research environment that is being extended to support physician decision-making in collaboration with the patient. Major efforts in tissue banking, patient data acquisition, biomedical informatics and genomic research (sequencing, genotyping, gene expression, whole genome analysis) comprise the experimental focus.

Founded in 2000, WRI, in located in Windber, PA, collaborates in all of its major initiatives with clinical groups at the Walter Reed National Military Medicine Center. Other WRI collaborators include the Thomas Jefferson University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Further information can be found at www.wriwindber.org.

About IDBS

IDBS is a global provider of innovative enterprise data management, analytics and modeling solutions. The company’s uniquely sophisticated platform technologies are used by more than 200 pharmaceutical companies, major healthcare providers, global leaders in academic study, and high tech companies to increase efficiency, reduce costs and improve the productivity of industrial R&D and clinical research. IDBS is clearly differentiated by its unique combination of award-winning enterprise technologies and domain knowledge in R&D.

IDBS’ solutions help scientists, hospitals and R&D businesses produce the world’s newest therapeutics, diagnostics and personalized treatments, high-tech materials and consumer products, faster, cleaner engines and fuels, breakthroughs in productive agriculture, healthy, safer food products, and high tech materials and products.

Founded in 1989 and privately held, IDBS is headquartered in Guildford, UK with a direct sales and support presence worldwide. IDBS is a 2010 Profit Track 100 company and the recipient of multiple awards including the Frost and Sullivan 'Enabling Technology' Award in R&D data management for 2010 and Queen's Award for International Trade 2011. For regular updates follow us on Twitter @IDBSsoftware

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