Found in Translation

Continued

A Single Integrated View

The challenge has been to build an IT support infrastructure that provides a "plug-and-play" environment for researchers, with workflow that can continually change and evolve as researchers work with a mix of clinical science, molecular science, and clinical practice.

"How do you combine data with high-throughput experimental techniques like genomics, genetics, and proteomics?" asks Jonathan Sheldon, chief scientific officer at InforSense, a pioneer in integrative analytics technology and WRI's key partner in its translational medicine initiative. "How do you bring those technologies together with the clinical data and make the results mean something to researchers?"

Working with InforSense, WRI has adopted an approach that provides a single integrated view of its various data resources, combined with analytical tools, so that the clinician and the molecular scientist or the epidemiologist can collaborate within a single informatics environment. "With InforSense on Oracle, the researcher can integrate these different types of data and do that in a very ad hoc, flexible way," says Sheldon. "He or she can bring in the clinical data, merge that with the genome-expression data, and carry out various analytics or modeling to look for combinations that have a clinical significance and utility," he says.

Once a researcher has identified a gene that, for example, suggests whether a patient will respond to a particular treatment, the system delivers that information back to the clinician at the center in the form of risk analysis algorithms.

"To make the information usable to the clinician, the InforSense solution for WRI takes complex analytical workflows, wraps them up, and deploys them as a Web portal that hides all the complexity," says Sheldon. In the Web portal, researchers and clinicians can browse and drill down into data, choosing from hundreds of dimensions, to identify patient populations for further exploration. The populations can then be used as a starting point for Web-deployed workflows that enable complex analysis of experimental data. As data and analysis techniques change, new workflows can easily be published into the portal, enabling informatics staff to support a broad, disparate, and evolving user community within a single technology framework.

"Even though the researcher may have built the most-complex workflows that use many different kinds of data sets, the clinician can hit a few buttons and the system runs the analytics in the background," says Sheldon. "The results are returned back into a portal that has a very intuitive interface for the clinician."