March 19, 2012
Translational Bioinformatics focuses on applications of bioinformatics innovations within a clinical context and touches nearly all areas of biological, biomedical, and clinical research. Since 2008, the TBI Summit provides the premier forum for interacting with leaders in informatics at the interface of biology and health care.
Session Title: TBI-04: SaaS-Based Translational Research: The Path to Reality for “Research in the Cloud”
Session Time: 3:30pm
Session Chair: Dr. Raimond Winslow, JHU
Panelists: Raimond Winslow, Ian Foster, Brian Athey, Deepak Singh
Abstract: Like virtually all other areas of biomedical research, translational bioinformatics struggles to evolve with the explosion in available healthcare data. To ride, rather than succumb, to this massive data wave, translational scientists need easy ways to move and mine datasets, without having to become IT experts. Cloud computing promises to alleviate some of these pressures; however, concerns about feasibility still exist for some scientists and their computing facilities, particularly in the areas of security, privacy and compliance. This panel will explore the requirements for a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that can be used today to transform translational research. Panelists will represent each constituency of a potential online research environment (the clinical researchers, the institutional computing service providers, the data management and transfer service providers, and the cloud computing service providers). The panelists will debate the delta between where we are – and where we need to be – for translational scientists to reliably and securely perform research in the cloud. During this discussion, the panel will address the feasibility concerns through examples of clinical research cloud computing case studies.