We are an integrated team led by Drs. Tianxi Cai and Katherine Liao with a mission to develop and apply biostatistics and bioinformatics approaches for clinical research. We focus on utilizing the rich clinical data in the electronic medical record (EMR) data as well as linked “omics” data for discovery research. Our group is affiliated with Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, VA Boston Healthcare System, and Harvard Medical School.

History

The Bioinformatics Research and Innovation Center for Clinical Research (BRIC) began as a collaboration out of the NIH Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) project over a decade ago. Tianxi led the methods development for i2b2, while Kat led the rheumatoid arthritis Driving Biology Project (DBP). One of the first projects was to identify patients with RA from millions of subjects, collect blood samples, genotype patients, link the data, and then perform clinical research studies. While this is now commonplace today, at the time analyses and linking of blood samples and data at that scale had not been done.

Leveraging the expertise of the i2b2 team, and the infrastructure of i2b2, they and their collaborators first laid down a pipeline for phenotyping using EMR data, incorporating methods such as natural language processing and machine learning. Through subsequent projects, they established methods and approaches for performing clinical research studies using EMR data linked with biologic data.

After the i2b2 project officially ended, Tianxi and Kat continued to collaborate on projects to continue to push forward methods at the intersection of bioinformatics and clinical research. With the development of EMR research platforms at BWH/Partners Healthcare, and around the world, the need for more efficient, accurate, and robust approaches for developing phenotype algorithms became even more apparent. Over the next several years, their group pushed forward methods to automate some of the time intensive manual steps.

In 2016 BRIC formed a formal collaboration with the Massachusetts Epidemiology Research and Information Center (MAVERIC) at the VA Boston Healthcare System.

Collaborations and Cores

Drs. Cai and Liao lead two cores supporting investigators interested in , one at BWH and one at VA Boston:

MAVERIC: The Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center (MAVERIC) is a research division of the V.A. Hospital in Boston. It focuses on observational, population based research to improve healthcare for veterans. At MAVERIC, BRIC leads the Applied Bioinformatics Core and work with the Phenotyping Core. Our team has worked with data from the CVD Merit project as well as the Million Veterans Project. We are currently collaborating with MAVERIC and the DOE to improve computing power and open up possibilities for new, large-scale data projects.