The IBI foundation partners led by UCD include NUI Galway, Trinity College Dublin and Queen’s University Belfast along with Hewlett-Packard as the first industrial partner. The total investment in the institute is expected to reach €30million over the next five years.
The IBI aims to develop the software tools required to achieve the ultimate goal of using genetic information to develop personalised life-long healthcare. The institute will collaborate with other academic and industrial partners to perform substantial research in health informatics, bioinformatics, image analysis, and systems modeling – disciplines central to biomedical informatics.
An important aspect of the work of the IBI will be to develop innovative software approaches to help us understand the relationships between genes and disease, how genetic variation manifests as both susceptibility to disease and response to therapy, and the influence of the environment. IBI will focus on driving new biomedical informatics research around breast cancer, prostate cancer, cardio-vascular disease, diabetes, and reproductive biology.
