Bioinformatics Shared Resource

Overview

The mission of the Bioinformatics Shared Resource (BISR) is to provide bioinformatic services to the GUMC research community, and the NCI-designated Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center (LCCC) Research Consortium. Within this Consortium, the BISR provides a centralized resource, computational tools, and large scale datasets to address the biological and medical informatics aspects of clinical, basic science, translational and population science research to investigators at both the LCCC in Washington, DC, and the John Theurer Cancer Center in New Jersey, which includes research at the Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation. From massive data analytics, management and annotation, to computational modeling and integration of molecular and clinical data, the BISR uses a broad spectrum of computational techniques for clinical and biomedical research, education and practice. Work in these focus areas is led by faculty members of the Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics (ICBI) and supported by a team of professionals with highly developed skills and experience in bioinformatics tools and methods. These include Health Information Technology, cohort discovery from electronic health records (EHR), analytics and visualization, software and database application development, security and privacy in Big Data, project management, and grants/contract development.

The primary objectives of the BISR are:

• To collaborate with investigators to enable utilization of big data for basic and translational research, clinical investigations, and population science research projects, including publications and grant development
• To educate investigators, staff and students in bioinformatics resources, tools and methodologies for the planning, analysis and interpretation of data-driven research studies
• To perform research in biomedical informatics and genomics data science methodology as it relates to the problems arising in collaborations on research projects
• To coordinate activities with the ICBI for timely implementation of emerging information technologies, platforms and tools

BISR has two main focus areas: Bioinformatics and Genomics Data Science for basic and translational research; and Clinical Informatics for Health Data management, analysis and visualization.

Bioinformatics and Genomics Data Science support is provided for large scale genomic, proteomic and metabolomic studies as well as Immuno-Oncology applications:

• BISR maintains cloud based (AWS, Google Cloud) scalable pipelines for Next Generation Sequencing Data processing and analysis:
• Whole Genome and Exome sequencing, RNA sequencing, DNA methylation sequencing,
• Viral informatics applications, metagenomics pipelines for microbiome research, HLA typing and others.
• For molecular profiling and sequencing studies, BISR team maintain an array of computational tools for processing and analysis of gene expression, DNA copy number, non-coding RNA, metabolomics and proteomics data as well as Systems biology methods and tools for downstream integrative analysis of multi-omics data.

Clinical Informatics for Health Data Science, management, analysis and visualization: support is provided for creating and maintaining clinical research registries and clinical databases:

• REDCap Services: REDCap is a secure web-based application for building and managing online surveys. ICBI provides REDCap services and support to Georgetown University. To date we host and provide support to 160 REDCap projects and 379 active users. Please complete the REDCAP Service Request Form to request a new REDCap project or email redcaphelp@georgetown.edu.
• Cohort Discovery: ICBI has access to over 7.4 million patient records from five center affiliated with the Georgetown-Howard Universities CTSA consortium providing a tremendous amount of clinical data to mine for research purposes. We have HIPPA certified data coordinators who are trained in PHI data extraction from EHRs. To date we have around 100 patient data requests from Georgetown University for clinical discovery research involving pediatric cancer outcomes, prevalence of genetics in the clinical, surgical outcomes, and other diverse clinical measures that can be derived from this treasure trove of data.
• Please fill out a Patient Data Request Form for these services.

Location

Georgetown University – 2115 Wisconsin Avenue NW, Suite G-100, Washington DC 20007