PNNL

Abstract

Nanomedicine deals with the development and biomedical application of nanotechnology-based methods and products. Nanotechnology provides the ability to manipulate and characterize matter at the nanoscale. This ability has enabled the research and development of nanoscale-sized objects such as nanoparticles and other nanomaterials for biomedical applications that have the potential to improve the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. In particular, nanotechnology has the potential to make medicine more personalized. However, to realize the goal of personalized medicine, multidisciplinary teams of collaborating scientists must manage and analyze large amounts of data generated from basic, pre-clinical and clinical studies, and clinical outcomes in an integrated way. Before one could effectively use the large and diverse nanomedicine datasets in translational research efforts to achieve the goal of personalized medicine, there are several unresolved issues related to information management in nanomedicine that have to be addressed. We have reviewed three areas of nanomedicine informatics that are critical in addressing the above issues: information resources; taxonomies, controlled vocabularies and ontologies; and, information standards. Progress towards these issues is essential to rapidly growing field of nanomedicine informatics.