Foundational biomedical informatics research in the clinical and translational science era: a call to action

Advances in clinical and translational science, along with related national-scale policy and funding mechanisms, have provided significant opportunities for the advancement of applied clinical research informatics (CRI) and translational bioinformatics (TBI). Such efforts are primarily oriented to application and infrastructure development and are critical to the conduct of clinical and translational research. However, they often come at the expense of the foundational CRI and TBI research needed to grow these important biomedical informatics subdisciplines and ensure future innovations. In light of this challenge, it is critical that a number of steps be taken, including the conduct of targeted advocacy campaigns, the development of community-accepted research agendas, and the continued creation of forums for collaboration and knowledge exchange. Such efforts are needed to ensure that the biomedical informatics community is able to advance CRI and TBI science in the context of the modern clinical and translational science era.Over the past decade the health and life sciences communities have experienced a marked and dramatic shift toward translational and team science-based approaches to both basic and applied research.^{1 2} This transition is due in part to policy and funding initiatives at the national level, such as the clinical and translational science award (CTSA) program. A common theme spanning this evolution is recognition of the critical need to apply biomedical informatics theories and methods to enable the collection, exchange, management, analysis and dissemination of multidimensional datasets and knowledge collections. For example, complex clinical phenotype data describing large populations must be integrated with similarly large amounts of genomic data in order to support the identification of clinically relevant phenotype–genotype correlations. These types of needs have catalyzed an explosion of informatics research and development targeting the clinical and translational research domains. Such efforts have enabled numerous advancements in applied clinical and translational research informatics knowledge and practice. However, at the same time, the maturation of clinical research informatics (CRI)¹ and translational bioinformatics (TBI)³ is at risk of failing to meet expectations if commensurate foundational research in those same areas is not conducted.