National centers for biomedical computing: from the BISTI report to the future

I had the privilege of becoming the Director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, one of the lead Institutes at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the National Centers for Biomedical Computing program, at the launch of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research. This gave me a unique perspective from which to observe this program. The perspectives described herein are my own. The emergence of the field of biomedical computing captured the attention of the leadership of the NIH toward the end of the 1990s. NIH Director Harold Varmus named a working group of the Advisory Committee to the Director “to investigate the needs of NIH-supported investigators for computing resources, including hardware, software, networking, algorithms, and training.” This project was termed the Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative (BISTI). The BISTI working group made four principal recommendations. Their selfdescribed centerpiece of these recommendations was “to inaugurate National Programs of Excellence in Biomedical Computing.” They noted that such “National Programs (are) the best opportunities (that) can be created for doing and learning at the interfaces among biology, mathematics, and computation.” The implementation of this recommendation became a component of the NIH Roadmap for Biomedical Research, a major initiative of the next NIH Director, Elias Zerhouni. ‘Bioinformatics and Computational Biology ’ was one of nine major components of the NIH Roadmap, consisting of a single programdthe National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBCs). A key aspect of all Roadmap programs was that they “span all areas of health and disease research and boundaries of NIH Institutes and Centers (ICs)” and that they “might not otherwise be supported by the NIH ICs because of their scope.” Furthermore, the Roadmap was intended to be an ‘incubator ’ where programs could be developed and then potentially ‘adopted’ by interested NIH ICs after Roadmap (now formalized as the NIH Common Fund) support ended. This reflects a tension that permeated the management of the NCBC program, that between the desire to develop centers with broad themes to optimize the utilization of computational expertise and the need to mesh the program with the disease, organ system, and life stage-focused institutes and centers whose missions are intended to be the prime potential beneficiaries of these centers. These considerations played a significant role in the development and management of the NCBC program. The first request for applications (RFA) for NCBCs was issued in September 2003 and four NCBCs were subsequently funded. A second RFA in the next year and three additional centers were funded. The management of these centers was widely distributed across NIH ICs, with both non-categorical ICs such as the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the National Center for Research Resources, the National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, and the National Library of Medicine, and categorical ICs such as the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the National Human Genome Research Institute playing leading roles, and staff members from many other ICs actively participating. In concert with the NIH, the NCBCs themselves worked to form a national network rather than a set of separate centers. In 2009, an RFA was issued to allow these centers to compete for renewal with additional applicants. This resulted in the renewal of five of the centers and the addition of one additional center. Note that each of the awards in the second phase required substantial co-funding from interested ICs to supplement decreasing Common Fund support. The BISTI working group report discussed the potential impact of enhancing biomedical computing. They stated: