NIAID has awarded grants to three research teams for the development of software that advances infectious and immune-mediated disease (IID) research. The three funded projects will develop software that improves the acquisition, management, analysis, visualization, and dissemination of IID data.
There is a need for easy-to-use software to enable new computational algorithms, tools, or technologies to advance biomedical research and support reproducibility and data reuse. Data access and reuse, a key strategic priority for NIAID, can lead to the discovery of new knowledge; improve our understanding of mechanisms of transmission, infection, immune response, and pathogenesis; and help us develop new and improved diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines.
These recent awards, focused on different scientific domains, will each develop methods and tools that provide insights into important research questions and create frameworks that can extend to the broader biomedical community. For example, one of the grant recipients, Dajiang Liu, Ph.D., M.A., of Pennsylvania State University, said that the grant will allow his team to develop new tools for discovery and clinical translations in autoimmune diseases.
"AI and data science have transformed biomedical research in autoimmune diseases,” Dr. Liu said. “With massive and complex datasets from electronic health record-based biobanks and multi-omics studies, the field desperately needs tools to translate big data into knowledge."
Software projects at various stages of maturity were considered, ranging from early-stage prototyping to software in later stages of development.
The NIAID-funded projects will result in software products that are easily accessible by the IID research community — either by being installed locally or through an online interface. The software will be developed and distributed consistent with community standards for reuse and interoperability. Software products must also use FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) metadata so that they can be found using the NIAID Data Ecosystem Discovery Portal.
The funding opportunity was administered by the NIAID Office of Data Science and Emerging Technologies (ODSET). It posted in June 2023 and closed the following October.
Learn more about the funded projects below.
Pennsylvania State University Hershey Medical Center
Principal Investigator: Dajiang Liu, Ph.D., M.A.
Methods and tools to integrate multi-omics datasets to understand preclinical autoimmune and immune-mediated diseases
University of California, San Francisco
Principal Investigator: Bryan Greenhouse, M.D., M.A.
Data and analysis ecosystem for eukaryotic pathogen targeted sequencing
Yale University
Principal Investigator: Gisela Gabernet, Ph.D.
Large-scale integrated data analysis of lymphocyte receptor repertoires with workflows