Skip to main content

About Biomedical Data Translator

As a result of recent scientific advances, a tremendous amount of data is available from biomedical research and clinical interactions with patients, health records, clinical trials and adverse event reports that could be useful for understanding health and disease and for developing and identifying treatments for diseases.

About Translator

To realize the vision of the Biomedical Data Translator and transition from the feasibility (possibility) assessment phase to a working platform that serves as a resource to the translational research community, we have funded teams of scientists, physicians, bioinformaticists and programmers to develop the Translator system. In fiscal years 2020 through 2023, we awarded approximately $13.5 million per year to researchers in the Biomedical Data Translator Consortium.

The platform created by the Consortium members and funded through NCATS’s Other Transactions Authority has been designed as an exploration tool integrating trusted data sources, which aids researchers in discovering novel connections representing biomedical knowledge. The alpha release of Translator allows the user to explore relationships between chemicals/drugs and either diseases or genes.

These relationships were chosen based on feedback from potential users and based on the current strengths of the Translator system. Ultimately, the system will be expanded to allow a researcher to find and explore relationships between almost any components of biologic systems.

The teams building the Translator software have come together into a cohesive consortium structure that makes collective decisions through a myriad of committees and working groups on infrastructure and standards that improve the functionality of Translator. The standards that have been created for Translator have been seeing widespread use in the computational biology and knowledge graph space, and we plan to continue fostering collaboration across the entire field through additional partnerships in the near future.

Try the Translator alpha web interface now!

Translator Data Type Examples

The following list provides a sense of the breadth of data types that have been integrated into the Biomedical Data Translator, but it is not exhaustive:

  • Diseases
  • Signs of disease
  • Symptoms (from patient registries and natural history studies)
  • Patient-reported outcomes
  • Electronic health records
  • Clinical encounters
  • Prescription data
  • Health insurance claims data
  • Diagnostic labs
  • Biomedical imaging data
  • Adverse event reports
  • Biomarkers
  • Organ systems
  • Subanatomy
  • Tissue types
  • Cell types
  • Cell lineages
  • Cell processes
  • Organelles
  • Orthologs/animal models
  • Microbiome data
  • Molecular mechanisms
  • Signaling pathways
  • Molecular and cellular networks
  • Environmental factors
  • Disease etiologies
  • Proteomes
  • Proteins
  • Post-translational modifications (PTMs)
  • Co-factors
  • Transcriptomes
  • Epigenomes
  • Genes
  • Genetic mutations
  • Functional polymorphisms
  • Therapeutic interventions
  • Intervention exposure
  • Pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics
  • Clinical trial data

Translator Articles and News

Learn how the Biomedical Data Translator program aims to help researchers more easily access and interrelate different data and languages.

Last updated on April 22, 2024