Orchestrating tomorrow's
biomedical research collaborations
INTRODUCTION
Solving complex biomedical problems relies more and more on
collaborative efforts among two or more investigators each with
different skills and expertise. It is often the case that the
most useful collaborations result from chance interactions among
investigators from different departments at the same institution or
among investigators at different
institutions from the same region.
OBJECTIVE
The goal of the BioSymphony project is to develop and make freely
available software for facilitating biomedical research collaborations.
We are establishing a database of biomedical investigators at Dartmouth
and throughout Northern New England that consists of annotated
information about each investigator mined from PubMed that can be used
to predict fruitful collaborations. Our hope is that this
resource will result in meaningful collaborations that otherwise might
happen only by chance.
SOFTWARE
The BioSymphony (BioSym) database and software is in early alpha
testing at Dartmouth Medical School. Sometime in early 2007
we
plan to make available a prototype web interface to the database that will allow
investigators to visually explore networks of predicted collaborations.
Check this web page or our blog (Epistasis Blog)
for updates.
EXAMPLE
The following interaction graph illustrates both inter- and intra-center relationships predicted from the number of Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) terms extracted from published papers in PubMed that each pair of investigators shares. Shown are project PIs from the COBRE-funded Lung Biology Center (Duell, Madden, O'Toole, Swiatecka-Urban, and Treadwell) and the COBRE-funded Center for Molecular, Cellular, and Translational Immunological Research (Berwin, Conejo-Garcia, Kelly, Ernst) at Dartmouth College.
The number in each box is the total number of unique MeSH terms
that each investigator has. The number next to a line connecting
two investigators is the number of MeSH terms those two people share in
common. We have highlighted in red connections with more than
five shared MeSH terms. Investigators not shown in the graph
(Kelly and Ernst) had no MeSH terms in common with anyone else.
The important observation from this graph is that two of the
three strongest connections are among investigators from different
centers. These inter-center relationships could be predictive of
potential fruitful collaborations among investigators with otherwise
disparate interests and expertise.
This page was last updated Januray 29, 2007 by JHM