Stanford - South Africa Biomedical Informatics Program

描述（由申请人提供）：最近高度宣传的疾病爆发表明，需要提高生物医学界收集、管理和快速交换全球基础生物学和医学数据的能力。 作为防治人体免疫机能丧失病毒（艾滋病毒）等流行病的全球战略的一部分，在受影响最严重的国家发展和支持培训有效、道德的生物医学信息学研究人员的能力的需要尚未得到满足。我们的建议解决了这一需求，利用最近建立的，生物信息学培训计划在西开普大学（UWC），南非转向生物医学信息学计划，并直接回应在南非训练有素的教师严重短缺。一个有重点的发展计划将使通过斯坦福大学历史悠久的生物医学信息学计划获得的经验，为UWC现有教师发现的缺点做出重大和可持续的贡献。该建议侧重于通过三种机制培养新的培训师：1）与斯坦福大学联合开发和教授短期课程，2）在UWC培训人员的支持下培养当地教学人才，3）通过支持斯坦福大学的访问学者和UWC学生，丰富研究社区并开发新的生物医学信息学课程材料。该计划支持的高优先级项目包括建立一个南非国家艾滋病毒数据库，该数据库建立在UWC现有的NIH资助的倡议基础上，以满足基因组学家的需求， 流行病学家和卫生保健界。将收集有关艾滋病毒基因组变异和患者对各种抗病毒治疗反应的信息，并因此开发新的或改进的治疗方法。需要这样一个数据库来支持NIH资助的Caprisa项目之前已经确定，并通过NIH资助的CAPRISA计划（www.caprisa.org）获得了初步支持。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Recent highly publicized disease outbreaks illustrate the need to increase the capacity of the biomedical community to collect, manage and rapidly exchange data that spans basic biology and medicine worldwide. As part of a global strategy to combat epidemics, such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), there is an unfulfilled need to develop and support the capacity to train effective, ethical biomedical informatics researchers in the countries most affected. Our proposal addresses this need by leveraging the recently established, bioinformatics training program at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa to revolve towards a Biomedical Informatics program and responds directly to the acute shortage of trained faculty in South Africa. A focused development program will enable experience gained through the long established Biomedical Informatics program at Stanford University to contribute significantly and sustainable towards shortcomings that have been identified by the existing faculty at UWC. This proposal focuses on developing new trainers by three mechanisms: 1) Extend the graduate curriculum with jointly developed and taught short courses from Stanford, 2) develop local teaching talent with support for trainees at UWC, and 3) enrich the research community and develop new curricular matedal in biomedical informatics by supporting Visiting Scholars and students from UWC at Stanford University. High priority projects supported by this program include development of a South African National HIV Database that builds upon an existing NIH funded initiative at UWC to serve the needs of genomicists, epidemiologists and the health care community. Information about HIV genomic variations and patient responses to various antiviral therapies will be collected and new or improved treatments developed as a result. The need for such a database to support the NIH-funded Caprisa project has previously been identified and initial support has been gained through the NIH-funded CAPRISA program (www.caprisa.org).