Grid infrastructure for clinical trials

Ian Foster pointed readers of his blog at a good article about CaBIG, the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid. This major project is led by the US National Cancer Institute and also involves Cancer Research Labs in the UK, with the aim to share data between cancer researchers. The UK's OGSA-DAI system is a major component of the deployed system.

It's particularly interesting to note that the system includes support for clinical trials. Clinical trials are time-consuming and expensive, so many people want better systems for managing them and a number of grid projects are tackling this area.

PsyGrid is one such project in the UK. They're not exactly blowing their own trumpet about this, but their system is being used as the studies and trials platform for the Mental Health Research Network, and has been selected by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) as the platform for providing electronic data collection services to support studies and trial across the Biomedical Research Centres.

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Distributed Thinking

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