News

In a paper published in the January 5, 2018 issue of Science, a team of University of Chicago researchers led by Thomas Gajewski, MD, PhD, demonstrated a strong link between certain strains of human gut bacteria and success rates for immunotherapy treatments for advanced melanoma. 

The CRI’s Manager of Bioinformatics Riyue Bao, PhD, played a key role as coauthor of this paper. Riyue conducted bioinformatics analysis of microbiome and genomic data to explore the differences in the microbial environments of patients who did and did not respond to treatment, as well as integrating multiple types of microbial and genomics data to identify molecular alterations associated with clinical outcome. She also conducted statistical analysis of clinical data used in the study, developed new approaches for interpretation of the analysis results, and contributed to writing the paper.

The results of this study have the potential to improve cancer treatment by predicting which patients will respond well to certain therapies, as well as opening the door to probiotic treatments that could enhance the effects of immunotherapy drugs.

Read more about the study and the CRI’s contribution here.

The Graham School MSc in Biomedical Informatics program has partnered with online education company GetSmarter to offer an 8-week online course in Healthcare Informatics. CRI Director Sam Volchenboum serves as Course Convener, guiding the course design and teaching some of the modules alongside other University experts. The online course was developed in order to bring the University of Chicago’s expertise in healthcare informatics to a worldwide audience, preparing students to enter a field that is becoming more complex and demanding by the year as more and more healthcare data is made available to study. Learn more about why we’re offering this course here. The next session begins February 28.

The 2017 cohort of the Graham School Master of Science in Biomedical Informatics program, which is supported and partially taught by the Center for Research Informatics, presented their capstone research projects this month in the program’s third annual Capstone Showcase. The eight projects featured a wide range of topics and approaches to informatics research. Read more about the capstones here.

CRI Director Sam Volchenboum’s piece in Wired from last June, “Social networks may one day diagnose disease – but at a cost,” was named in TIME this week as one of the day’s “Five Best Ideas.” The best ideas are determined jointly by TIME and the Aspen Institute, an educational and policy studies organization based in Washington, DC. Read Sam’s article in Wired here.

University of Chicago Medicine has been awarded a $50,000 grant from the Rally Foundation for Childhood Cancer Research to support CRI Director Sam Volchenboum’s work building a research data commons for rhabdomyosarcoma, a pediatric soft tissue cancer. This project, called INSTruCT, has the goal of bringing together clinical trials data from children with rhabdomyosarcoma around the world to enable data mining studies. Learn more about INSTruCT and the CRI’s other pediatric cancer research data commons work here.

The Department of Pediatrics has released a Request for Applications for a new initiative to foster excellence in research scholarship. This initiative will provide seed funding for promising clinical and health outcomes research projects focused on the health of children and their families. In particular, the Department aims to promote the early career development of translational and clinical faculty researchers, with the goal of generating preliminary data for subsequent funding applications.

This seed funding will be available to support services from the Center for Research Informatics, such as data requests from the Clinical Research Data Warehouse, data analysis by the Bioinformatics Core, or application development.

The awards: four awards of up to $5000 each
Who is eligible: faculty, fellows, and residents with faculty mentors
How to apply: find the Request for Applications here and apply by October 15

As part of a newly announced five-year, $14.8 million NIH grant, the CRI will play a key role in building the Gabriella Miller Kids First pediatric data resource center. The center, a multi-institutional project headquartered at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, will provide pediatric researchers with a much-needed way to work with large sets of genomic and clinical data related to childhood cancer in order to better predict and treat it.

Two UChicago data science groups, the CRI and the Center for Data Intensive Science (CDIS), will take part in the project under the leadership of CDIS Director Robert Grossman, PhD, and CRI Director Sam Volchenboum, MD, PhD. A team combining both groups’ expertise in building data commons will be responsible for designing and operating the technical foundations of the project: the software that will be used to process and share data within the center, including the integration of disparate data sources, coordination with third-party applications, and support for data analysis.

By leveraging our years of experience working with multi-institutional data networks and large biomedical datasets, through this project the CRI has the opportunity to make a major contribution toward ending childhood cancer. Read more about the Kids First center and UChicago’s role here.