A Prototype System for Grid-Based Cancer Biomedical Informatics

Biomedical Informatics deals with the study and analysis of disease related data to aid drug discovery and help find better treatment procedures. The data includes heterogeneous information such as patient records, clinical observations and experimental genomic data. These data sets are distributed among various hospitals, diagnosis and research centers that are geographically separated and independently controlled. Consequently, researchers at these centers work with islands of data and informatics tools, a situation that impedes a global study of the disease. This scenario poses the requirement for a common infrastructure that facilitates collaborative sharing of data and analysis applications among the biomedical research community. Grid technology has been successfully applied to provide computational environments for such scenarios in various scientific fields including physics, astronomy, and more specifically, bioinformatics [3] [6]. Recently, several nationwide and international grids such as National Cancer Institute(NCI)’s CaGRID [5] [1] are under development to provide a grid-based collaborative computational infrastructure for biomedical research. However, these grids are aimed at specific escience domains that have different operational procedures and goals. This requires specialized modules over the grid to facilitate the development of escience applications over grids.