IBM research tool to be used in $4.5m health project

Stan Beer
Friday, 28 October 2005 10:00

IT Industry - Development

University of Melbourne, together with Victoria's second largest health service, Melbourne Health and Bio21 Australia, the country's largest biotechnology organisation, have been awarded $4.37 million in government funding to expand the use of IBM's Information Integrator for clinical and pharmacogenetics research.

The Bio21:Molecular Medicine Informatics Model (Bio21:MMIM) breaks down major barriers to pharmacogenetic research by allowing the amalgamation of scientific, clinical, medical and genomic research data maintained by different institutions and research teams.

'We are delighted to receive further government funding to continue our work on the Bio21:Molecular Medicine Informatics Model,' said Robert Merriel, business development manager for Melbourne Health and chair of the steering committee for Bio21:MMIM. 'The model is a world first - it enables researchers to combine a wide variety of clinical research and public data to study the impact of personal and genetic factors on the effectiveness of medicines.'

Bio21:MMIM was piloted by a group of internationally renowned Victorian medical research organisations during the first half of 2005, and has already led to significant research outcomes in the fight against colorectal cancer and epilepsy.

A key element in the success of the pilot was the development of Bio21:MMIM as a federated data warehouse, enabling health and medical researchers to maintain control over databases of sensitive clinical research information, satisfy privacy legislation and meet the ethics requirements of public and medical watchdogs.

'The Bio2:MMIM uses open architecture so the solution does not require the participants to restructure their data or lose any autonomy over their patient information,' said Richard Hill, partner, healthcare, business consulting services, IBM Australia. 'As a virtual repository, Bio21:MMIM also meets stringent ethics, privacy and security requirements. At the same time, it is highly flexible and scalable and can easily accommodate new researchers and data sets.'

The Bio21:MMIM assigns a  unique identifier to the clinical research data so that it can be shared by researchers without revealing identifying information. Yet the unique identifier can enable a patient's physician to contact the patient should the research reveal scope for new diagnosis or treatment. Re-identification and contact can only be done with ethics committee approval and by the treating institution.