The NIH Venture Program Announces First Award for the SysBio Initiative
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund Venture Program has announced its first award for the Systems Biology Data Platform Leveraging the Accelerating Medicines Partnership, or the Venture Program SysBio Initiative. Broadly, the initiative aims to integrate various data types that will allow researchers to explore the role of a specific gene, molecule, cell, or pathway across tissues involved in different disease. NIH plans to fund one award 4.8 million per year over a period of three years, pending successful completion of milestones and availability of funds.
The Venture Program SysBio Initiative is a collaborative effort between the Common Fund and the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS). This initiative will integrate various data types collected through the Accelerating Medicines Partnership® (AMP®) program. AMP, launched in 2014 and managed by the Foundation for the NIH (FNIH), is a public-private partnership that brings together the NIH, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), biomedical and life sciences companies, non-profits, patient-advocacy groups, and other organizations. The goals of AMP® are to improve the development of new diagnostics, facilitate better selection of targets for drug development for chronic diseases, promote broad sharing of research data, and streamline processes for bringing new treatments to patients. The Venture Program SysBio Initiative will create a centralized portal and tools to allow researchers to search for data across existing platforms, empowering reuse and reanalysis of currently disconnected datasets to answer new scientific questions. To learn more about AMP, visit fnih.org/AMP.
The Venture Program SysBio Initiative is one of two flagship Venture Initiatives that launch Venture Program as a new form of Common Fund support. The second initiative, called the Common Fund Development and Application of Imaging Technologies for Oculomics, aims to support development and application of novel, noninvasive ocular (eye) imaging technologies, machine learning algorithms, and other tools to identify highly sensitive and specific biomarkers for diseases that affect the entire body. These initiatives will provide a framework for developing short-term projects with potential for significant, outsized impact that are responsive to the shared priorities of NIH Institutes, Centers, and the Office of the Director. In addition, these initiatives emphasize brief, modest investments that can be implemented swiftly in response to emerging opportunities, with a strong potential to accelerate science quickly.
New Venture Program SysBio Initiative Principal Investigator, Matt Bookman of Verily Life Sciences, LLC, in collaboration with partners, will work to build the SysBio FAIRplex, a FAIR Platform for EXploration of Systems Biology data (OT2OD037975). This platform aims to use FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles to maximize the value of the AMP® data ecosystem. FAIRplex will provide a single point-of-entry for researchers to access diverse, harmonized data and user-friendly exploratory tools.
The Venture Program SysBio Initiative will integrate rich data types including phenotypic, clinical, molecular, and patient-reported outcomes data. The integration of various data types collected through AMP® will empower researchers to explore the role of a specific gene, molecule, cell, or pathway across tissues involved in different diseases, allowing identification of shared mechanisms within subsets of patients to explore scientific connections. This Venture Initiative will lay the groundwork for a future goal of expanding access and tools to include data from other existing datasets outside of the AMP® program.
To learn more about the Venture Program SysBio Initiative, watch this informative video:
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Explore more information about the Common Fund Venture Program SysBio Initiative on the Common Fund Venture Program homepage and the Venture Program SysBio Initiative homepage. To stay up to date on the latest information about the Venture Program SysBio Initiative, join the Initiative listserv.
