Our Strategic Partners

The NCRI Cancer Research Informatics Coordination Unit has developed strategic partnerships with the National Cancer Institute Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology, in Washington, the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge and the National Health Service in the UK. The NCRI is establishing a strong working relationship with these organisations. The NCRI and NCI have agreed to coordinate their activities in order to avoid unnecessary duplication and share important informatics tasks ahead. The potential exists to develop a joint US/UK cancer informatics platform.

 

 

The NIHR Research Capability Programme (RCP) has been established to enable research to achieve its full potential as a core activity for healthcare. It also aims to facilitate the use of NHS data to lead to improvement in the quality and safety of care of patients and the public.

The RCP is developing a service called the Health Research Support Service (HRSS) to help researchers analyse a wide range of healthcare and other data. The HRSS aims to allow researchers to carry out studies that lead to improved health outcomes, effective treatment, patient safety and quality of life by analysing and understanding trends in patient and other data. The service will safeguard patient confidentiality by anonymising data where possible, asking patients’ permission before researchers can view the data and ensuring required approvals from regulatory authorities have been acquired.

The NCI regards its major initiatives as being interdependent; each effort also consumes and generates information of significance to other initiatives, and to the broader cancer research community. To address the informatics needs of these major initiatives, the NCI has established the Centre for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (NCI CBIIT). The NCI CBIIT coordinates and deploys informatics in support of NCI research initiatives. Its goal is to maximise interoperability and integration of NCI research and its related information. Informatics support provided by the NCI CBIIT includes the caBIG® project which provides an IT platform of services, tools, and data that connects research with clinical care. This platform enables the collection, analysis and sharing of data and knowledge.

The EMBL- European Bioinformatics Institute is a centre for research, services and training in bioinformatics. The institute manages databases of biological data - including DNA and protein sequences, macromolecular structures and gene expression - and develops tools for accessing and analysing this information. The mission of the EMBL-EBI is to ensure that the growing body of information from molecular biology and genome research is placed in the public domain and is accessible freely to all facets of the scientific community in ways that promote scientific progress.

 

 

The British Library's collection of scientific, technical and medical (STM) information is one of the world's foremost resources, providing researchers with access to a vast array of content.  To help researchers navigate their way effectively through this and the large volume of information in circulation the BL are developing two web-based resources that are complementary to the work of the NCRI Informatics Initiative. Firstly, UK PubMed Central, which provides free, quick and easy access to an archive of peer-reviewed research articles and journals in biomedical and life sciences. The second resource is RIC (The Research Information Centre), an on-line environment that supports the information needs of research collaboration from the initial idea through to project completion.