Implementing bioinformatic methods in medical research
- Reference number
- RIF14-0081
- Start and end dates
- 160101-211231
- Amount granted
- 15 000 000 SEK
- Administrative organization
- Göteborg University
- Research area
- Life Sciences
Summary
Next generation sequencing (NGS) has the potential to revolutionize diagnostics and introduce true personalized medicine. The goal is to develop and make available at the Bioinformatics Core Facility (BCF) the type of cutting edge technology, competence and strategies within bioinformatics that will strengthen the competence at the Facility, aid the local research community and facilitate the development of new offerings within industry and the healthcare setting. The BCF has identified strategic areas of focus that will provide us with solutions to three crucial issues: i) data integration, we will examine different ways of combine data from different high throughput data, using stroke as a case study, ii) early clinical diagnosis, we will evaluate different strategies for the analysis of diseases that require a prompt elucidation, with a focus on the diagnosis of some types of cancer at an early stage and iii) reliability, where we will employ statistic approaches to identify an appropriate approach to handle clonal sequencing of amplicons for SNP analysis. We expect to contribute with reliable and standardized methods for the analysis of NGS, to ease its interpretation and prompt the researcher or clinician to the key biological relevant questions rather than focusing on the process of obtaining the results. We foresee that increasing the competitiveness through these projects, we will be able to consolidate The Bioinformatics Core Facility as a national infrastructure.
Popular science description
Massive parallel sequencing (MPS) has gone through a tremendous progress in terms of speed, throughput and cost reduction. These advances have enabled the research community and industry to develop a large number of MPS applications in molecular biology and medicine. These applications have the potential to revolutionize diagnostics and introduce true personalized medicine. This project aims to develop cutting edge technology, competence and strategies within bioinformatics that will aid the local research community and facilitate the development of new offerings within industry and the healthcare setting. The Bioinformatics Core Facility at the University of Gothenburg will take case studies, such as stroke, to identify the best approach to incorporate different data types from the different MPS applications that will help to identify risk factors. BCF in collaboration with the Sahlgrenska University Hospital, will focus to build up a platform that will aid in the diagnosis of some types of cancer at an early stage as well as detecting any possible relapse. There are plenty of questions to address within medical research, and these are just some examples that will be tackled in this project. The Bioinformatics Core Facility is actively contributing with reliable and standardized methods for the analysis of MPS data, so as to ease its interpretation and prompt the researcher or clinician to the key biological relevant questions rather than focusing on the process of obtaining the results. We expect to consolidate the Facility as a national infrastructure and ensure a strong long-term development of excellent data-driven research in the region.