BACKGROUND
The applications to be developed in the MedBioinformatics project are focused on two key medical specialties, oncology and neuropsychiatry, which cover an important percentage of the burden of chronic diseases and have a big impact in terms of citizens’ wellbeing, while they show several comorbidities and show an active area of research involving a wide range of network biology approaches. Identifying the bioinformatics needs of these two specialties will facilitate the identification and design of applications that will meet the needs of biomedical professionals from other areas.
Among the applications to be developed there is a new generation of tools to study the relationship between genotype and phenotype, a browser of disease biomarkers, tools to analyse and predict comorbidities, and applications to support molecular diagnostics and personalized treatment of cancer. To accomplish its objectives, MedBioinformatics has assembled a multidisciplinary team made up of bioinformatics and translational and clinical researchers, which will clearly contribute to overcome the existing communication barriers between them, which are due to differences in expertise and academic background, professional objectives, and even to language and cultural differences.