James Cimino, M.D., chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, attended the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) Board of Regents meeting. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak, DDS, Ph.D., presented NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli’s vision for the future of NIH. The vision focused on expanding biomedical research data use to inform new research and improve health outcomes, and connecting research to primary care to optimize patient outcomes.

Bertagnolli emphasized that expanding biomedical research data use would integrate data from basic and social science research, public health, and clinical care, while also providing education and workforce development. The expansion aims to increase capacity for data hosting, enable low-cost access to data using open-industry data standards, support broad access to advanced analytics and computational power, and employ a federated architecture for data sharing and use.

The meeting also discussed the NLM Strategic Plan, which aims to accelerate discovery and advance health through data-driven research while building a workforce for data-driven research and health. Running through 2027, the plan aspires for NLM to serve as a facility where biomedical and clinical research domain experts, trainees, patients, advocates, and others can access required data and analytic tools to answer novel research questions.

NLM looks to serve as an epicenter for NIH-funded research to advance information science, analytics, and data science while providing educational programs for the research workforce to help expand biomedical informatics and data science capabilities.

Associate Director for Data Science at NIH, Susan Gregurick, Ph.D., discussed important NIH data science goals that will help develop the vision of attaining a modernized and integrated biomedical data ecosystem. Key data science goals include sustaining the NIH Policy for Data Management and Sharing, enhancing human-derived data for research through cross-disciplinary training, establishing new opportunities in software, computation, and AI, supporting the federated data infrastructure, and strengthening the data science community through increased training opportunities and workforce expansion.

Dr. Cimino also attended the Friends of the NLM Gala in Washington, D.C., where honorees included Nobel laureate in Physiology/Medicine Katalin Karikó, Ph.D., and Executive Vice President of Scripps Research Eric Topol, M.D.