The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is seeking a small business with the ability to create and operate a genomics portal (GenPort) that will provide researchers access to genomic and phenotypic data from multiple cohort studies, together with tools for creating synthetic cohorts and performing statistical analyses.
Omics data from well phenotyped human cohorts are an invaluable window into the involvement of particular molecules and pathways in diseases. While much omics data has been made accessible through programs such as dbGaP, most investigators lack the bioinformatic expertise and computational tools that are required to analyze available data.
Hence, there is widespread interest in developing tools that will provide non-informatic scientists, as well as informaticians, the opportunity to probe multi-platform, individual-level omics data. Providing wider access to omics data will help to focus basic science and human biomarker research on pathways and systems that are most relevant to human disease.
The GenPort program is expected to leverage and be interoperable with NIH’s NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative, which is currently developing tools for integration and analysis of large, multi-dimensional data sets.
The selected GenPort contractor is expected to use general methods and approaches being developed through other efforts such as BD2K, to customize those tools to the data characteristics, scientific questions, and investigator capabilities.
Further details are available via Solicitation Number: HHS-NIH-NHLBI-RDSS-HR-16-15. The response deadline is April 27, 2015.
