QuBBD: Collaborative Research: Precision medicine and the management of infectious diseases

传染病给世界各地的公共卫生、社会和经济造成了巨大的损失。复杂的疾病动态、有限的资源以及不断调整干预措施以适应疫情演变状态的需要，使有效控制传染病变得具有挑战性。在对大数据潜力的广泛认识的推动下，最近的技术进步使实时收集、管理和访问关于传染病演变的异类数据成为可能。鉴于最近和预期在大数据方面取得的进展，该项目设想，未来传染病的管理将依赖于知识转移系统，该系统将实时、不同种类的数据流映射到为管理传染病的政策制定者提供的建议。这些建议可确定人口中应给予干预措施或其他资源分配最高优先的亚群。然而，科学距离创建这样一个系统还需要数年时间，因为它的实施将需要在疾病建模、数据驱动的决策、计算和优化方面进行重大创新。该奖项支持启动一个合作研究项目，通过创建使用大数据和精确医学来为传染病的管理提供信息的蓝图，为这些创新迈出关键的第一步。拟议的研究将开发一类新的动态系统模型，以识别具有同质疾病动态的人群中的亚组。使用最大似然法估计索引这些模型的参数；然后，通过计算这些参数的抽样分布，我们应用精确医学中的汤普森抽样和基于模型的策略搜索算法来确定最优资源分配，以管理流行病的传播。提出的研究将动态系统模型与子群识别和数据驱动的资源分配联系起来。这将在应用数学、统计学和计算机科学方面创造新的知识和研究的新方向。该奖项由国家卫生研究院大数据向知识转化(BD2K)倡议与国家科学基金会数学科学部合作支持。

Infectious diseases place an enormous toll on public health, societies, and economies across the world. Effective control of an infectious disease is made challenging by complex disease dynamics, limited resources, and the need to continually adapt interventions to the evolving status of an epidemic. Driven by widespread recognition of the potential of big data, recent technological advances have made it possible to collect, curate, and access heterogeneous data on the evolution of an infectious disease in real-time. In light of recent and anticipated advances in big data, this project envisions that future management of infectious diseases will rely on knowledge-transfer systems that map real-time, heterogeneous data streams to recommendations for policy-makers managing an infectious disease. These recommendations might identify subgroups in the population that should be given highest priority for interventions or other resource allocations. However, science is years away from creating such a system as its implementation will require significant innovations in disease modeling, data-driven decision making, computing, and optimization. This award supports initiation of a collaborative research project that takes critical first steps toward these innovations by creating a blueprint for using big data and precision medicine to inform management of an infectious disease.The proposed research will develop a novel class of dynamical systems models that identifies subgroups in the population with homogeneous disease dynamics. Parameters indexing these models are estimated using maximum likelihood; then, by computing draws from the sampling distribution of these parameters, we apply Thompson sampling and model-based policy-search algorithms from precision medicine to identify optimal resource allocations to manage the spread of an epidemic. The proposed research bridges dynamical systems models with subgroup identification and data-driven resource allocation. This will create new knowledge and new lines of research in applied mathematics, statistics, and computer science. This award is supported by the National Institutes of Health Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Initiative in partnership with the National Science Foundation Division of Mathematical Sciences.