BioGrid Australia - Health through information
BioGrid dynamically links data which includes dates of diagnosis, clinical symptoms, pathology, radiology reports, and availability of a biospecimen sample, genomic data, MRI images, treatments: drug therapy, radiotherapy and surgical status in a privacy protected way for authorised users.
We have made steady progress with ethics approvals, collaborative agreements, IT implementation and data linkage. We are proud of the collaborator research outcomes that have resulted from this, and some of the current work includes:
- Data mining – looking at patterns and exceptions
- Data analysis – associations between the genetic and clinical data
- Evaluation of clinical services
- Quality and audit reports of Clinical treatment
We welcome our newest members and look forward to helping with more research projects.
Dr Marienne Hibbert
Project Director
BioGrid Australia and the Australian Cancer Grid
The BioGrid Australia and ACG platform provides the ability of life sciences researchers to link data across all states regardless of their existing linkage and research platforms. This is the vision to establish a Life Science Grid of which the Australian Cancer is the flagship. The BioGrid Australia/ACG is a virtual repository and will link to all participating teaching hospitals and Cancer Research Centres in Australia as well as the Integrated Cancer Centres in Victoria. By providing access to multiple data sets, to the data on clinical outcomes, quality and audit data as well as genomic data, images and analytical tools, this platform positions Australia to maximise Life Science research.
What is BioGrid Australia?
BioGrid Australia is the platform and infrastructure that provides researchers access to data in many disease types and data from disparate existing databases at many institutions. It provides access while protecting both privacy and intellectual property. The data which is co-located in a virtual repository can be linked with publicly available research and genetic profiling data.
BioGrid Australia provides a flexible and secure method for interrogating the multiple data sources, where thousands of records of patient data is record-linked across all the databases and institutions. Only the authorised researchers can extract sub-sets of data, transform where required and test research questions using their own analytical tools.
What is the Australian Cancer Grid?
The Australian Cancer Grid is the flagship of the expansion of the BioGrid Australia platform. The focus is to provide Cancer researchers with data on the Clinical and Surgical outcomes in the various types of Cancer as well as to the Tumour biospecimens which Cancer patients have donated for research purposes. The depth and breadth of the data will provide a huge resource and covers
the following tumour streams initially:
Colorectal, Brain, Breast, Lung, Sarcoma, Gynaecology, Prostate, Head & Neck, Upper Gastro-intestinal, Melanoma, Renal, Prostate.
How BioGrid Australia works
In addition to Cancer, BioGrid Australia is already covering the areas of Neurosciences, Diabetes, and Cystic Fibrosis. It has implementations at sites in Victoria and is in various stages of implementation in Canberra, New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania. International sites are also actively discussing joining.
The diagram above explains how the BioGrid Australia system works.
- Source databases from various institutes are extracted, transformed and loaded (ETL) nightly to their respective Local Research Repositories (LRR).
- Authorised researchers are then able to query and analyse the data via the Federated Data Integrator (FDI) using SAS enterprise guide (A querying and analysis software).
- The FDI is an integrator for accessing information data and metadata across physical boundaries.
- The data is sent to the user via a virtual private network (VPN) once permission has been obtained and is de-identified and given a unique subject indentifier (USI). The FDI does
not store data.
Who has funded BioGrid Australia?
The Australian Cancer Grid (ACG) and the pilot via Bio21 - Funding is provided by Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development, The Victorian Government.
Phase 2 expansion across multiple institutions - Funding provided by Department Education Science and Training, Commonwealth of Australia. Originally funded by the Victorian Government for the pilot, the DEST funded phase significantly increased the scale and sophistication of the BioGrid Australia platform. The platform has been extended to provide a range of tools and capabilities that enable users to better structure, share, search for, transform, and analyse data across the research institutes nationally and internationally. The collaboration expanded from an initial group of five hospitals to include two universities, three research institutes, five new teaching hospitals (making 9 in total across 2 states) plus 3 private hospitals. The project is now increasing the access of this technology and infrastructure to new researchers, bringing in new clinical specialty groups, new data types, extend to different types and areas of research, enabling clinically relevant research and providing access to innovative research tools in medical informatics and Bioinformatics.
Additional information that is important to know
- All participating sites have ethics approval to enable researchers to access secure,
privacy protected research information that spans multiple disease groups and multiple organisations. - Every researcher needs approval from the data custodian and BioGrid Australia management
- Committee to be authorised to access the data.
- Audits are done monthly to check the users and data queried using BioGrid Australia.
Contacts for further information
Dr Marienne Hibbert Project Director
BioGrid Australia Tel: 61 (3) 9342 7066 Email: admin@biogrid.org.au |
Mr Richard Tate ACG Project Coordinator and Business Development Manager BioGrid Australia Tel: 61 (3) 9342 3175 Email: admin@biogrid.org.au
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