Enabling personalized medicine through an interoperable IT infrastructure: an overview of the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid.

To implement personalized medicine successfully, multidisciplinary teams of collaborating scientists must manage and analyze vast quantities of genomic and clinical outcomes data in a cohesive and integrated way. This process is complex and not supported by the existing IT infrastructure and tools available to most researchers. To address these needs, the National Cancer Institute initiated the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid initiative in 2004, to develop and deploy the interoperable IT infrastructure and tools needed to help basic and clinical researchers manage and share these data. Now, the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid is being deployed to cancer centers and other biomedical research organizations across the USA and around the world, facilitating collaborative research that will ultimately lead to improved patient outcomes.