Denis Wall, an autism researcher at the Stanford School of Medicine http://med.stanford.edu is leading a new project to establish the largest ever collaborative open access repository of bioinformatics data on autism.
The project funded with a $9 million grant by the Hartwell Foundation www.thehartwellfoundation.com will assemble many types of biological data from children with autism and make the information freely available to researchers.
The Hartwell Autism Research and Technology Initiative known as iHART www.hartwellfoundation.com?iHART.shtml will provide a centralized repository of data to benefit biomedical research on autism.
The initiative seeks to assemble data through collaboration with researchers. This bioinformatics effort will deploy state-of-the-art computational tools of systems biology and machine learning and inference algorithms to inspire users to exploit the full potential of the data related to autism.
The researchers will be able to draw on many kinds of data related to autism spectrum disorder including phenotypes, proteomics, metabolomics, genomics, measurements, and images of brain activity, information on the gut microbiome, blood based biomarkers, physician narratives, diagnostic test results, and treatment protocols.
In addition to the School of Medicine, the Foundation with collaborate with the Simons Foundation www.simonsfoundation.org, UCLA www.ucla.edu, and the New York Genome Center www.nygenome.org to accelerate the addition of autism data to the database.