VBI awarded $27 million from NIH to support infectious diseas...(dle the designated bacterial data in the...)

The new contract covers the development of two web-based resources for biomedical research. The first part of the project supports the development of the Pathogen Portal for the entire BRC program. The Pathogen Portal will serve as an informatics coordinating center and gateway for the four newly established BRCs. This publicly accessible web portal will provide general information about the BRC program, serve as a gateway to the individual BRC web sites, and provide a central data repository and analysis resource for all selected NIAID category A-C priority pathogens supported by the individual BRCs. Said Sobral, "In addition to its centralized coordination role, the Pathogen Portal project will work closely with other external partners, for example NIAID's Clinical Proteomics Centers for Infectious Diseases and Biodefense, among others, which is making candidate protein biomarkers linked to disease available to the wider scientific community."

The second part of the project supports the development of the PATRIC 2.0 BRC. In June 2004, NIAID awarded CIG a five-year, $10.3 million contract to establish a multi-organism relational database for infectious disease research that focused on biodefense and emerging infectious diseases. The PathoSystems Resource Integration Center (PATRIC; see http://patric.vbi.vt.edu/) was created to serve as a comprehensive web-based resource for an important subset of pathogens from the set of selected NIAID category A-C priority pathogens. The work supported by the PATRIC 2.0 award, which will span all bacterial species in the selected NIAID category A-C priority pathogens list, will consolidate earlier PATRIC work, as well as the work of other BRC systems that handled bacterial data, into PATRIC 2.0.
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