The University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health plans “to lead a culture shift in data-sharing rippling through scientific fields and harness it to improve global knowledge of infectious diseases.” The initiative will be backed by a five-year, $6.7 million NIH grant.
Pitt Public Health will lead a multidisciplinary group of computer scientists, biostatisticians and biomedical informatics experts to direct the inaugural Network Coordination Center for the Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS), a collaborative research network originally launched by the NIH in 2004 to assist the nation in preparing for infectious disease threats. Wilbert van Panhuis, MD, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology at Pitt Public Health and biomedical informatics at Pitt’s School of Medicine, will lead the new center.
“The scientific community is increasingly recognizing that sharing research data and software not only benefits individual research projects, but increases the impact of science and innovation on the greater good. However, nobody’s figured out exactly how to do this for global infectious diseases,” Van Panhuis said. “What we’re going to do is leverage that interest in ‘open science’ to create a framework that will make it easy to share, find and use research data and software to combat infectious diseases.”
In its first year, the MIDAS Network Coordination Center will largely concentrate on standardizing and uploading hundreds of existing infectious disease datasets into its platform, as well as reaching out to scientists who use such data to ask how MIDAS data and software can best serve them.
“Our hope is that after that first year, the MIDAS network will be able to demonstrate the benefits of open science and open data for making new discoveries,” Van Panhuis said. “We’ll also be going after new data ourselves, on behalf of MIDAS, collecting datasets from health organizations and government entities worldwide, so that the scientists have to spend less time obtaining data and can instead concentrate on making discoveries with it.”