The joint summits on translational science: Crossing the translational chasm

TY - JOUR

T1 - The joint summits on translational science

T2 - Crossing the translational chasm

AU - Sarkar, Indra Neil

AU - Payne, Philip R.O.

N1 - Funding Information: Indra Neil Sarkar PhD, MLIS Center for Clinical and Translational Science, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA Department of Computer Science, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA Philip R.O. Payne PhD philip.payne@osumc.edu Department of Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA Center for Clinical and Translational Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA Comprehensive Cancer Center, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA From its beginnings nearly 60 years ago, the field that soon became known as “medical informatics” focused on the harnessing of computational and information science approaches, as well as socio-technical frameworks, in order to improve the quality, safety, and outcomes of clinical care. With the emergence of bioinformatics as a formal area of research approximately 30 years later, the biomedical and life sciences enterprises became positioned to gain deeper understanding of the underpinning phenomena associated with disease. The amalgamation of bioinformatics and medical informatics, formally becoming termed “biomedical informatics”, suggested that there was a continuum of concepts that spanned from wet-bench research to bedside medicine. The major thrust in research in biomedical informatics was thus to support a wide range of practitioners as they sought both to ask and answer complex questions spanning the biological, clinical, or public health domains. In many ways, biomedical informatics shifted from hypothesis-generation research to developing approaches to support the testing of specific biomedical hypotheses. By the early part of the 21st century, the scope and pace of foundational biomedical research was increasing rapidly, largely spurred on by the completion of the $2.7B Human Genome Project. Innovations in bioinformatics complemented by significant technological advances quickly helped the research community contemplate high-throughput ‘omics’ studies that would realize the promise of employing the blueprint of life in order to foster a new generation of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. In a complementary manner, the clinical research community began to contemplate the necessary infrastructure and methodological innovations needed to bring bench-side innovations into the clinic in a more timely and efficient manner. Such emerging lines of research and development were largely motivated by the emergence of the United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap, which included specific objectives surrounding the “re-engineering” of the clinical research enterprise. These “re-engineering” efforts ultimately evolved into the launch of the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) program. Funded by the NIH through its National Center for Research Resources (and now via a new proposed Center that will focus on translational science), and ultimately seeking to identify and engage a nationwide network of 60 sites, the CTSA initiative focuses on creating academic and scholarly homes with accompanying infrastructure, services, and workforce development programs. The program is intended to catalyze rapid improvements in the state of clinical and translational research knowledge and practice and to decrease the time between basic science discoveries and the implementation of their clinical implications in routine practice. Given an increasing appreciation by the biomedical informatics community that research in bioinformatics and clinical informatics traditionally did not fully address the needs of such emergent scientific and application domains, there arose the need for the definition and advancement of two specific sub-specialties of biomedical informatics: (1) Translational Bioinformatics and (2) Clinical Research Informatics. Translational Bioinformatics (TBI) shifted the focus from informatics addressing the full range of biology to investigative scenarios specific to human health . This important distinction helped define translational bioinformatics to be more squarely part of the biomedical informatics continuum, while still providing a bridge to bioinformatics methods that may be developed in the broader life science community. Clinical Research Informatics (CRI) similarly shifted the focus of informatics innovations from traditional clinical practice scenarios to meeting the needs of clinical investigators, both in dedicated research settings as well as in complex combined clinical practice and research settings. Similar to TBI, the field of clinical research informatics quickly incorporated an explicit and well understood need to support and facilitate the translation of knowledge and evidence from the research context into clinical and public health practice, which by necessity involves a strong relationship with the traditional practice and knowledge base of clinical informatics. TBI and CRI were thus developed from the outset to meet the needs of researchers using informatics innovations to advance the state of clinically relevant biomedical knowledge and ultimately the delivery of healthcare . Importantly, TBI and CRI were conceptualized to embrace the principles incumbent to biomedical informatics science, emphasizing a shift from a supporting role in hypothesis discovery (e.g., “what are possible treatments for disease y?”) to the performance of hypothesis testing (e.g., “will treatment x work to cure disease y?”). In this light, the TBI and CRI communities continue to provide solutions to core scientific information needs such as those associated with the facilitation of team science, the management of large data sets, or the design and execution of investigational studies (e.g., in the context of CTSA and analogous programs). The two communities have simultaneously developed major emphasis areas relative to the development of novel methodologies capable of enabling new paradigms for instrumenting complex systems and ultimately engaging in hypothesis testing relative to large-scale and multidimensional data sets, which are also generalizable to the full spectrum of biomedicine. As such, knowledge discovery remains an important component in both TBI and CRI; however, the ability to move from knowledge discovery to validation and evidence generation is a major feature of both TBI and CRI. With the specific vision to design a meeting intended to bring together the thought leaders in the emerging area of translational bioinformatics, Atul Butte from Stanford University led the way to the first AMIA Summit on Translational Bioinformatics in 2008, held in San Francisco. Its success formed the foundation for the concept of an informatics meeting where biologists, clinicians, computer scientists, and informaticians along with other experts would convene to discuss the core issues associated with translational bioinformatics. Complementary to other major meetings, including the AMIA Annual Symposium, Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology (ISMB), and the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB), the AMIA Summit on Translational Bioinformatics provided a forum for focused conversation about bioinformatics approaches and their implications in the context of human health. The success of the first meeting led to the endorsement of a 2009 meeting, also held in San Francisco, and chaired by Yves Lussier (then at University of Chicago; now at University of Illinois at Chicago). In addition to continuing the dialogue specific to TBI, CRI-focused programming was being developed in a parallel and complimentary manner under the auspices of AMIA’s Clinical Research Informatics Working Group and Clinical Research Informatics Steering Task Force. Their efforts included a CRI-specific “expo” at the AMIA Annual Symposium, as well as CRI-centric tracks of thematic areas at other AMIA scientific meetings. The Summit on Translational Bioinformatics had become an accepted Spring tradition in the bioinformatics community, timed to occur between AMIA Annual Symposium and ISMB (and also after PSB). The 2010 meeting, which was chaired by Peter Tarczy-Hornoch (University of Washington), further solidified the meeting’s venue to be in San Francisco, which enabled the meeting to develop synergies with the vibrant biotechnology community based in that area. By this time, the CRI community had begun plans towards having a more focused meeting of its own, extending beyond the “expo” model just mentioned. Such an evolution was motivated in large part by the recommendations of the AMIA Clinical Research Informatics Steering Task Force, led by Michael Lin (Mayo Clinic) and Philip Payne (The Ohio State University). It was in this manner that the first Summit on Clinical Research Informatics was held in 2010, led by Peter Embi (then at University of Cincinnati; now at The Ohio State University). This first-of-its-kind summit was strategically co-located with the existing Summit on Translational Bioinformatics, thus creating a new venture that was collectively known as the AMIA Joint Summits on Translational Science. As part of this new series of summit meetings, a “bridge” day, spanning the two meetings and jointly designed by their respective Scientific Program Committees, was created. This “bridge day” allowed for the inclusion of keynote presentations, scientific content, and professional networking opportunities illustrative of the overall translational science continuum (where there is no crisp boundary between TBI and CRI). This approach was particularly important, given an increasing number of meeting participants who were interested in participating in both summits. Accordingly discussions began for how to integrate the 2011 meetings more fully. As the chairs of the 2011 TBI and CRI meetings, we took a partnering approach from the very early stages of planning the Summits, intending to build upon the successes of the prior years’ meetings. From underscoring the common name that was kept to reflect the combination of the two meetings (“The Joint Summits on Translational Science”) to the shared programming of an enhanced “bridge day” that increased common programming spanning both meetings, the summits were designed as a full week of translational science – enabling attendees to learn about and discuss informatics innovations from molecules to populations. Specific registration categories were created to allow attendees to participate in either Summit separately or both. Thus, while there was great effort to create synergy between the meetings, we sought to ensure a definable identify for each meeting and its participants. The Joint Summits in many ways reflect the paradigm of contemporary biomedical science, which necessitates striking a balance between the continuous pursuit of basic science and clinically relevant insights. By having two separate meetings with a common identity, momentum is held from the first day of the Summit on Translational Bioinformatics to the last day of the Summit on Clinical Research Informatics, essentially offering a “hand-off” between participants from basic science researchers to clinical investigators. In addition, we selected a Bridge Day keynote speaker (Kenneth Buetow from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, who also served as the opening keynote speaker for the Summit on Clinical Research Informatics) with the intent of highlighting success in bridging the translational gap from molecules to populations. From its beginnings, a key feature of the Summit on Translational Bioinformatics was the selection and open access publication of the best papers. This year, the Summit on Clinical Research Informatics joined in in the open access publication of its best papers here in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI). These papers were collectively chosen by each Summit’s Scientific Program Committee based on initial reviews and then subjected to a second stage of rigorous peer review through the JBI editorial process (addressing comments raised in the initial review as well as those potentially raised in secondary review). The ultimate success of translational science will not be the innovations that are made singly by those within either the TBI or CRI community, but instead by those that embrace the spirit of trans-disciplinary team science towards a new era of medicine. By assembling the accepted manuscripts into a single special issue of JBI, we intend to catalyze further cross-fertilization between the TBI and CRI communities. We hope that you enjoy the selections from the 2011 Joint Summits on Translational Science.

PY - 2011/12

Y1 - 2011/12

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=83955161051&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.jbi.2011.11.011

DO - 10.1016/j.jbi.2011.11.011

M3 - Editorial

C2 - 22138364

AN - SCOPUS:83955161051

SN - 1532-0464

VL - 44

SP - S1-S2

JO - Journal of Biomedical Informatics

JF - Journal of Biomedical Informatics

IS - SUPPL. 1

ER -