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Translational Bioinformatics: Coming of Age

Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics, Department of Medicine and Department of Pediatrics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA; Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, Palo Alto, CA

^_* Correspondence: Atul Butte, MD, PhD, Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics, 251 Campus Drive, Room X-215 MS-5479, Stanford, CA 94305-5479 (Email: abutte{at}stanford.edu).

Received for publication: 04/10/08; accepted for publication: 08/15/08.

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) recently augmented the scope of its activities to encompass translational bioinformatics as a third major domain of informatics. The AMIA has defined translational bioinformatics as "... the development of storage, analytic, and interpretive methods to optimize the transformation of increasingly voluminous biomedical data into proactive, predictive, preventative, and participatory health." In this perspective, I will list eight reasons why this is an excellent time to be studying translational bioinformatics, including the significant increase in funding opportunities available for informatics from the United States National Institutes of Health, and the explosion of publicly-available data sets of molecular measurements. I end with the significant challenges we face in building a community of future investigators in Translational Bioinformatics.