NEW YORK, Sept. 13 (GenomeWeb News) - The European Bioinformatics Institute has been awarded a €550,000 ($674,744) grant from the European Commission to study the overlap between bioinformatics and medical informatics.
The project, called "Synergies in Medical Informatics and Bioinformatics," or SYMBiomatics, was funded under the EC's Sixth Research Framework Program. Over the next fifteen months, nine organizations from the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, and the Netherlands will "document the state of the art in biomedical informatics" by speaking to experts in both fields and by studying the scientific literature, according to an EBI statement.
EBI will coordinate the effort, which will prepare a white paper on its findings that will be presented at a meeting next summer. The report is expected to guide the EC's future funding policy on the two fields, EBI said.
As clinical research moves toward a better understanding of the molecular basis of disease, the field of medical informatics is expected to overlap with bioinformatics.
"It's critical that the two fields of bioinformatics and medical informatics work together cooperatively to solve many common and complex problems," said Gérard Comyn, acting director of the EC's information society and media directorate-general. "We predict that in the very near future these two previously separate disciplines will share vast amounts of information that will result in a massive improvement of the quality of life for European citizens."
Further information on the project is available here.