Research scientists often spend hours if not days hunting for the specific chemical, machine or genetically modified organism they need to perform experiments. This search may soon only take a matter of minutes, however, thanks to the creation of a multi-institution scientific database, called eagle-i, that will provide scientists with a list of all research resources available across multiple colleges and universities. At Dartmouth, eagle-i is being led by Dartmouth Medical School professors Jason Moore and Steven Fiering.
The pilot project is being funded by a $7.5-million grant from the National Institutes of Health through the American Reimbursement and Recovery Act, Moore said in an interview with The Dartmouth. Nine institutions, including Dartmouth and Harvard University, are currently involved in the project, which began this October.
Fiering said the database is needed to increase communication among researchers.
"A lot of resources, especially the stuff not yet published, are relatively invisible to people, even within the same institution," Fiering said. "There's a lot of investment going on that's being underutilized because people don't know it exists."
Twenty cents of every dollar spent on research is used on redundant resources, according Harvard Medical School professor Lee Nadler, who heads the eagle-i consortium. Existing resources, including research equipment and genetically modified organisms, are "invisible resources," he said.
"It's crazy, because we're wasting an enormous amount of resources, and science goes so much slower if people have to do the same thing over and over," Nadler said in an interview. "The money gets spread out so much thinner."
The accessibility of specific resources is especially important in biomedical research because the field is so specialized, Fiering said. It is difficult for researchers to locate specific resources because they often rely unsuccessfully on search engines like Pubmed or Google, according to Thomas Ulrich, the communications coordinator at Harvard Medical School's Clinical and Translational Science Center.
Mark Israel, the director of the Norris Cotton Cancer Center and a professor at DMS who is not involved with the consortium, said he believes that the project, if successful, will encourage communication about what resources are available and where they can be found.
"This project will facilitate the exchange of reactants, which will enhance opportunities for communication, which will increase collaboration," Israel said.
The consortium's first goal is to develop the database infrastructure, Moore said. Investigators will then work to identify the nine universities' available resources and incorporate them into the database, he said.
"We're hoping that if we're successful, the NIH will want to expand this program to include other universities," Moore said. "We hope this will become the model for how all institutions in the country share research."
To prevent intellectual copyright conflicts, the database will provide only the contact information for the owner of a particular resource, Moore said. Scientists will be able to decide whether or not to share their resources, he said.
"The nice thing about this [database] is if an investigator has a piece of information they don't want to share, they don't have to," Moore said. "It's completely voluntary."
The consortium will test the efficiency of the pilot database by using it to compile resources related to obesity research, Fiering said.
The nine institutions involved in the project were selected because of their diversity, and because they are all involved in obesity research, Nadler said. For example, the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, another participating institution, studies the prevalence of obesity in Alaskan Indians, he said.
Fiering said the consortium incorporates a variety of colleges and universities because the system is meant to work at many different types of institutions. Moore and Fiering cited Dartmouth's status as a rural institution with "high quality, highly visible research" as an important contributor to the diversity of the project.
A database developed by the eagle-i consortium may also affect the way the NIH issues funding, Ulrich said. As a result of the database, the NIH could potentially spend less money on research development allocate more money for research projects, he said.
The eagle-i consortium is so named because an eagle's eyes can see a rabbit from a mile away, Nadler said.
"The eye of an eagle can see the invisible," he said. "That's what we're trying to do."
