The National Institutes of Health issued a funding opportunity last week calling for applications to develop a data coordination and integration center that will address the opportunities and challenges posed by two NIH efforts: the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) and the Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures (LINCS) initiatives.
According to the announcement, the center will focus on “perturbagen-response data and signatures while ensuring that the resulting resources are effectively utilized by the community by addressing challenges related to biomedical big data.”
A successful center will, among other things, “ensure consistent annotation of data and tools generated within the LINCS program; incorporate (without replicating databases) relevant non-LINCS perturbation data into the LINCS resource; support integration of relevant data, signatures, and tools to allow for seamless exploration of the LINCS program’s output …; [and] support linkages to outside knowledge bases, data portals, and resources; support training in perturbation-data science skills.”
The NIH has planned a webinar where staff will provide potential applicants with an overview of the announcement and to answer questions that will be held on January 13, 2014. Prospective applicants are encouraged to submit their questions or comments to [email protected] prior to the meeting.
Letters of intent are due on February 19 with applications to be submitted on March 19. The earliest start date for the project is November 2014.