About the Institute

The nature of biomedical research has been transformed during the past decade. This transformation has been driven in large part by development of new technologies for high throughput data generation which now make it possible to acquire gene sequences, measure the complement of genes and proteins expressed in cells and/or tissues, map protein-protein interactions and image functional properties of cells, tissue and organs under a wide range of conditions. The impact of these technologies on identification of the cause, diagnosis and treatment of human illness will be profound. It will soon be common for clinical research studies to collect genetic, transcriptional, proteomic, imaging and clinical data from every patient in large, carefully selected cohorts sharing a specific disease diagnosis. The challenge of the coming decade will be how best to use these multi-scale biomedical data to gain a quantitative understanding of disease mechanisms across hierarchical levels of biological organization, to identify biological markers which correlate with different disease states and inter-individual differences in disease risk and to discover more effective therapeutics targeted to meet the needs of the individual.

The Johns Hopkins University has created the Institute for Computational Medicine (ICM) to address this challenge. The mission of the ICM is to develop quantitative approaches for understanding the mechanisms, diagnosis and treatment of human disease through applications of mathematics, engineering and computational science. Research will be focused in three broad areas. Research in Biological Systems Modeling is directed at understanding the molecular basis of human disease through the development and application of experimentally-based dynamical systems models. Research in the area of Computational Anatomy is directed at mathematical and computational analysis of anatomic structure/function and its variation in health and disease. Research in Bioinformatics is directed at development of novel methods for representing, managing and analyzing biomedical data, including biomedical applications of statistical learning.

The Institute, chartered as of July 1, 2005, is located in the new Computational Sciences and Engineering Building at the Homewood campus which opened in August of 2007. The ICM consists of Faculty and Affiliated Faculty organized in Research Groups and Centers, including the Center for Cardiovascular Bioinformatics and Modeling and the Center for Imaging Science. The Institute will hire four new faculty to be appointed in appropriate Departments of the Whiting School of Engineering (see ICM News).