An infrastructure for interconnecting research institutions

Many researchers believe that personalized medicine is a potential solution to the well-known challenges facing the pharmaceutical industry worldwide today. Achieving the full promise of personalized medicine requires a new systems approach to biomedicine that will only be enabled by novel, interoperable IT infrastructures that facilitate simpler data access, data sharing, and enhanced collaboration. This article will describe how the technology developed in the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid® (caBIG®) program (http://cabig.cancer.gov/) from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) is already enabling many research organizations to implement personalized medicine approaches for their basic and clinical research programs.