About the National Mesothelioma Virtual Bank
Early diagnosis and effective treatment of mesothelioma is desperately needed. The disease affects 4,000 people in the United States each year and the outcome for those diagnosed is grim. The goal of the NMVB is to support research that will benefit these patients, and prevent future development of the disease. The National Mesothelioma Virtual Bank (NMVB) is led by the collaborative effort of the Departments of Biomedical Informatics, Epidemiology, and Pathology at the University of Pittsburgh, and is funded by a grant from the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The NMVB resource is designed to provide mesothelioma tissue samples with high-quality and well-characterized multimodal annotated data to researchers. The NMVB team strongly believes that progress in translational and clinical research — in cancer as well as other disease areas — depends on the ability of researchers to access high-quality tissue that is associated with meaningful annotation.
The NMVB data warehouse system is a model-driven n-tier architecture based upon Unified Modeling Language supported by a set of Common Data Elements with controlled vocabulary and ontology. This system is designed in such a way to facilitate semantic and syntactic interoperability and to make the data understandable, and shareable for end-users. It will also involve creation of data annotation and query tools, data mining, image storage and analysis tools and a data-warehouse for genomic and proteomics data sets.
The Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh is one of the innovators in the field of informatics. It has shown extensive expertise in developing efficient, robust, and intuitive tools for tissue banking to support the research community including the Cooperative Prostate Cancer Tissue Resource, Pennsylvania Cancer Alliance Bioinformatics Consortium, the Shared Pathology Informatics Network, the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, and the Early Diagnosis Research Network for colorectal and pancreatic malignancies.