Internet2 hosts genomic research collaborative

Preventive care is good for everbody. It fosters health and wellbeing and drives down care costs. Although some illnesses and causal agents can be directly linked, most cannot. Smoking, for example, has been proven to be a cause of lung cancer. But ongoing questions in the medical community continue to be focus on the role--and the importance--of genetics as it relates to disease. The questions extend to mental health, where cause and effect remain largely unidentifiable.

Advances in the field of genomics are likely to provide answers to questions such as these. A project announced in February between researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and George Washington University is one. Utilizing the Internet2 network, scientists at George Washington University’s Colonial One High Performance Computing Center will pilot ultra-high-speed, 40-gigabit-per-second data transfers from the NIH’s National Library of Medicine (NLM), using both organizations’ new 100-gigabit-per-second links.

Mark Hagland, editor-in-chief  Healthcare Informatics-sister publication to Behaviroral Healthcare--interviewed Dr. Mazumder and Michael Sullivan, M.D., who is associate director of health sciences for Internet2. Dr. Sullivan, whose clinical background is as an emergency physician and whose administrative background is as the CEO of an emergency physician group, and who has 25 years’ experience in medical informatics, as a medical software developer and health IT consultant. Hagland spoke with Drs. Sullivan and Mazumder regarding recent developments at Internet2 and the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, and the implications of the work being done in the HIVE program and across Internet2, for genomically facilitated patient care going into the future. Read the interview here.