The Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation on Wednesday unveiled its new Center for Biomedical Data Sciences, which promises to accelerate the foundation’s cutting-edge studies and benefit research throughout the state.
“This center will cement OMRF as a leader in the latest research methods and as a hub for collaboration,” U.S. Rep. Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma City said during a ribbon-cutting event at OMRF. “I can’t wait to see what Oklahoma scientists accomplish with the space and technology surrounding us today.”
Constructed in former laboratory space at the heart of OMRF’s Oklahoma City campus, the center is designed to maximize interface with the foundation’s five research programs. It’s home to conference and training centers, a series of collaborative hubs, offices for the team of data scientists who staff the center, as well as a dizzying array of computer hardware and software.
Already, the center’s team of data scientists is assisting on research projects studying everything from Alzheimer’s disease to arthritis.
“For example, we’re using AI to investigate the many factors at play in autoimmune diseases like lupus and multiple sclerosis,” said Courtney Montgomery, Ph.D., a biostatistician and geneticist who is the center’s founding director. “We’re also helping to better understand muscle aging by parsing the hundreds of thousands of data points collected with high-resolution microscopes.”
In a normal month, the center hosts 60 one-on-one training sessions for scientists and helps researchers analyze data for at least a dozen scientific papers. While most of the beneficiaries are OMRF scientists, Montgomery and her staff also assist researchers from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma State University and the Oklahoma City Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
OMRF President Andrew Weyrich explained how the exponential growth in scientific data made clear the need for a centralized resource to help process that information.
“A single experiment can produce data equivalent to a spreadsheet 200 million columns and 3 billion rows,” Weyrich said. “To take advantage of every piece of that information, we must have specialized tools and a new generation of computing power.”
The late U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe secured $1.9 million to build the center through a congressional community project request. Bice and U.S. Rep. Tom Cole of Moore also were instrumental in the funding request.
Separately, the McCasland Foundation, based in Duncan, and the United Way of Central Oklahoma provided grants to help complete the center.
OMRF is an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institute with more than 50 labs and 500 staff dedicated to understanding and developing more effective treatments for cancer, diseases of aging, autoimmune conditions and cardiovascular disease. Three life-saving drugs have been born from OMRF discoveries, and its physicians treat more than 3,000 patients living with lupus, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.
