CULTURE AND RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE 355
A third group of programs is institutional in nature. One program establishes new academic Cen-
ters of Excellence in Complex Biomedical Systems Research^47 that promote the analysis of the organiza-
tion and dynamic behaviors of complex biological systems through the development of multi-investiga-
tor teams capable of engaging biomedical complexity with a scope of activities not possible with other
funding mechanisms, including research, training, workshops, symposia, and other forms of outreach.
Typical areas of interest include computationally based modeling of processes such as the cell cycle;
pattern formation during embryogenesis; the flux of substrates and intermediates in metabolism; and
the application of network analysis to understanding the integrated systemic host responses to trauma,
burn, or other injury. A second program on Integrative and Collaborative Approaches to Research^48
encourages collaborative and integrative approaches to research on multifaceted biological problems
for individual investigators with existing support who need to attract and coordinate expertise in
different disciplines and approaches and require access to specialized resources, such as computational
facilities, high-throughput technologies, and equipment. A third program^49 supports new quantitative
approaches to the study of complex, fundamental biological processes by encouraging nontraditional
collaborations across disciplinary lines through supplements to existing R01, R37, or P01 NIGMS grants
to support the salary and expenses of collaborating investigators such as physicists, engineers, math-
ematicians, and other experts with quantitative skills relevant to the analysis of complex systems.
Finally, a major contributor to research that includes biology and computation is the NIH Roadmap.
The Roadmap is a broad set of funding opportunities and programs dealing with research issues that,
due to their complexity, scope, or interdisciplinary nature, could not be addressed adequately by a
single NIH institute or center. Relevant BioComp programs described by the Roadmap include molecu-
lar libraries, which in part seek to develop large databases of “small molecules,” and structural biology,
which includes research to develop algorithmic tools for analyzing and predicting protein structure.
The most significant BioComp initiative within the Roadmap, however, is the Bioinformatics and
Computational Biology program. This program seeks to create and support a National Program of
Excellence in Biomedical Computing (NPEBC), a national network of software engineering and grid
resources to support cutting-edge biomedical research. The prime components of the NPEBC are the
National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBCs), seven 5-year U54 grants that total approximately
$120 million, along with a larger number of R01 and R21 individual grants to support collaboration
opportunities with the NCBCs.
The NCBCs are intended as more than merely well-funded research centers; their missions of
training, tool creation and dissemination, community support, and liberal intellectual property policies
for software and data are designed to create national networks and communities of researchers orga-
nized around BioComputational research. The structure of the grant process required the identification
of three different research thrusts (or “cores”): a core of computational research, responsible for per-
forming original work in algorithms and computer science; a core of biomedical research, or “driving
biological projects,” and a core Biocomputing engineering, responsible for both interfacing between
computation and biomedical research, and creating the concrete tools and software systems to actualize
the research.
The recipients of the first round of NCBC funding were announced in September of 2004, covering
four centers. The second round, expected to fund an additional three centers, will be announced in 2005.
The centers funded in the first round include:
- The Stanford Center for Physics-based Simulation of Biological Structures, an effort that seeks to
create common software and algorithmic representation for modeling and simulation, addressing prob-
(^47) See http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-GM-03-009.html.
(^48) See http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PA-00-099.html.
(^49) See http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PA-98-024.html.