Leveraging Data Science is a Crosscutting Theme in NIH’s New Strategic Plan

Earlier this month, NIH released a new strategic plan to help guide efforts to achieve the agency’s mission of “seeking fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and using that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.”

The “NIH-Wide Strategic Plan, Fiscal Years 2021–2025” plan expresses the following objectives and goals:

The plan also presents five crosscutting themes that enable and inform the achievement of the plan’s goals and objectives.

Data science and the corresponding necessary IT infrastructure figure prominently throughout the strategic plan. NIH is in the process of implementing its Strategic Plan for Data Science, released in 2018, to guide its modernization and integration of the biomedical data ecosystem.  NIH plans to use data science to maximize the value of generated data, accelerate discoveries, and improve health outcomes. Transformative technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality are yielding incredible results in the realm of biomedical research and discovery. The agency is also committed to harmonizing and sharing data while protecting individual privacy and data security.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)’s ability to detect patterns and predict outcomes using big datasets is augmenting human capacity and advancing research. Additionally, NIH plans to build a set of programs “to foster machine learning, support the generation and management of large-scale datasets, convene multidisciplinary teams of researchers, and develop a set of ethical principles for NIH-funded researchers to follow when using AI.”

One of NIH’s 35 “bold predictions” for the next five years that are listed at the end of the strategic plan involves the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).  NIH predicts, “AI will reveal molecular signatures associated with the return to health after an acute illness (e.g., COVID-19).”

As an example of designing research for “everyone,” the plan highlights NIH’s All of Us research program. NIH began the “All of Us” research project in 2018 with the goal of enrolling at least a million people in the world’s most diverse health database. The program aims to improve health using big data science. Participants fill out online surveys about their health, share their EHR data, and in some cases contribute biosamples. As of April 2021, more than 315,000 participants had contributed to the effort. May 2021 marked the first anniversary of the program’s cloud-based research platform, the Researcher Workbench.

NIH also aims to create modern data environments to accelerate research. Technological advances for computing power and data generation have the potential to accelerate biomedical research.  However, technical hurdles still exist for accessing, analyzing, and sharing such massive datasets. NIH is conducting multiple initiatives to build platforms, workspaces, and provide tools and applications to researchers to securely store, analyze, and share data assets. Two examples include the Genomic Data Science Analysis, Visualization, and Informatics Lab-space and the Cancer Research Data Commons. These platforms allow researchers to combine and analyze diverse data types, which can lead to discoveries in disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.

Although 80% of NIH’s annual budget goes to support the extramural research community in the form of grants to universities, medical schools, and other research institutions, federal IT contractors can find opportunities to assist NIH in the creation and modernization of their IT infrastructure and data science workspaces for use by researchers and NIH’s own institutes.