Dear Nanotechnology Work Group Participants,

Our goal is to leverage ongoing activities in nanobioinformatics by integrating widely distributed data and sharing it, thus permitting further development of an integrated, federated system of databases that contain the necessary computational tools for data extrapolation, interpretation and metadata analysis.

Mission Statement

Demonstrate the scientific potential of federating nanotechnology databases through pilot projects aimed at integrated search and retrieval of nanomedicine and nanotoxicology datasets.

Objectives

This Working Group has several long-term goals:

• The project is intended to demonstrate nanotechnology database interoperability in the context of existing datasets and scientifically-relevant applications and user scenarios.
• To accomplish this goal, the project is intended to establish a common framework for describing nanotechnology data with common data elements and identifying nanomaterials with unique common identifiers.  The development of these elements and identifiers will be driven by “real world” data from the nanotechnology community.
• To encourage adoption and use by the community, the project will include substantial documentation and problem-based tutorials to illustrate the scientific potential of integrated nanomedicine resources.

These goals are motivated by two high-priority nanomedicine informatics applications:

• The rational design of nanomaterials with customized cellular targeting behaviors.
• The development of robust structure-activity relationships to predict nanomaterial toxicity and tailor this toxicity for therapeutic applications and/or to reduce health hazards.

The Nano WG is a working group of the caBIG ICR and is expected to work closely with the other ICR working groups and also with other interested parties, including

• ICR Workspace
• ICR Information Representation Work Group
• VCDE workspace
• NCI Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer
• Other NIH institutes
• IANH
• NIST
• FDA
• EPA
• ASTM
• Other organizations to be identified through the activities of this working group

Recent News

Upcoming Scheduled Presentations

Teleconference Materials

The meeting Date is hyperlinked to the notes and hyperlinks in the Executive Summary are for specific presentations