Strategic planning for national biomedical big data infrastructure in China

Abstract

The promise that big data will revolutionize scientific discovery and technology innovation is now being widely recognized. With the explosive growth of biomedical data, life science is being transformed into a digital science in which novel insights are gained from in-depth data analysis and modeling. Extensive and innovative utilization of biomedical big data is a key to the success of precision medicine. Therefore, constructing a centralized national-level biomedical big data infrastructure becomes crucial and urgent for China. Such infrastructure should achieve superb capacity of safe data storage, standardized data processing and quality control, systematic data integration across multiple types, and in-depth data mining and effective data sharing. Full data chain service including information retrieval, knowledge discovery and technology support can be provided to data centers, research institutes and healthcare industries. Relying on Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, agreements have been signed that a main node of the infrastructure will be located in Shanghai, and a backup node will be set up in Guizhou Province. After a construction period of five years, the infrastructure should greatly enhance China’s core competence in collection, interpretation and application of biomedical big data.

Keywords

biomedical big data / national infrastructure / precision medicine

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program on Precision Medicine (Nos. 2016YFC0901704, 2016YFC0901900 and 2016YFC0901600), the National Grand Program on Key Infectious Diseases (No. 2015ZX10004801-005), and the National High Technology Research and Development Program (Nos. 2015AA020104 and 2015AA020108).

COMPLIANCE WITH ETHICS GUIDELINES

The authors Zhen Wang, Zefeng Wang, and Yixue Li declare that they have no conflict of interests.

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2017 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg