The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) — one of 27 Institutes and Centers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — was established to transform the process of delivering treatments and cures for disease to patients. One strategic focus for the Center is on rare diseases. With 7000 rare diseases, a one-disease-at-a-time approach to clinical and translational science will not work. Instead, NCATS seeks to find what is common among diseases and demonstrate how advances for one disease can seed innovation in other areas.<br/><br/>Today there is a tremendous amount of biomedical research data and data available from disease classifications, health records, clinical trials and adverse event reports that could be useful for understanding health and disease and for developing and identifying treatments for all diseases. Ideally, these data would be mined collectively to provide insights into the relationship between molecular and cellular processes (the targets of rational drug design) and the signs and symptoms of diseases. But currently, these very rich yet different data sources are housed in various locations, often in forms that are not compatible or interoperable with each other. All of these factors limit the ability to get more treatments to more patients more quickly. To address these problems, NCATS launched the Biomedical Data Translator program, called “Translator” for short. Through this program, NCATS is supporting research to develop a groundbreaking computational tool that enables connections among conventionally siloed data types. Once completed, Translator will be able to draw on data sources ranging from air quality measurements to electronic health records and molecular mechanisms of disease. Initial demonstration projects focus on data sharing, novel integrations of data, and novel analytic capabilities, leading to a better understanding of the relationships between rare and common diseases and helping NCATS to realize its rare disease strategic vision.

Biomedical data translator: Supporting data integration and rare disease research

2019 Spring National Meeting

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.