The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University, Northwestern University, the University of Washington and Sage Bionetworks, together with the Scripps Research Institute, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Iowa and the Jackson Laboratory, have been awarded a five-year, $25 million cooperative agreement from the National Center for Advancing Translational Science to create a new Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Program: the National Center for Data to Health (CD2H).

The award will coalesce and coordinate informatics activities across the CTSA Program, a network of more than 50 medical research institutions, to provide collaborative clinical and translational research infrastructure.

The new program will be led by Melissa Haendel (Oregon Health & Science University), Christopher Chute (the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine), Kristi Holmes (Northwestern University), Sean Mooney (University of Washington) and John Wilbanks (Sage Bionetworks).

Chute, M.D., Dr. P.H., M.P.H., Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Health Informatics, professor of medicine, chief health research information officer at Johns Hopkins Medicine and deputy director, informatics core, of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, described the important role that collaborative informatics plays in health. “All CTSA hubs have shared an aspiration for federated analyses of clinical data across the network, married with public repositories of basic science data, to achieve unprecedented levels of biomedical knowledge discovery and improved practice,” he said. “CD2H will catalyze this process and coordinate the myriad of social, legal and technical requirements to make this practical.”

Excerpted from Johns Hopkins Medicine.