May 7, 2004 (CIDRAP News) – The National Institutes of Health (NIH) this week announced four grants totaling more than $28 million to develop techniques for electronically simulating natural or terrorist-caused infectious disease outbreaks and responses to them.
The grants are part of an initiative called MIDAS, or Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study, the NIH said in a news release. The recipients are Los Alamos National Laboratory, Emory University, Research Triangle Institute International, and a consortium led by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
MIDAS is sponsored by the National Institute for General Medical Sciences, a part of the NIH that deals with bioinformatics, officials said. NIGMS Director Jeremy M. Berg, PhD, commented, "MIDAS is designed not only to help prepare us for infectious disease crises, but also to be an active part of the response. In the case of a national emergency, MIDAS scientists can redirect their work to help government officials quickly determine the best way to deal with the epidemic."
Three of the four grants "will support the creation of mathematical models to study various aspects of infectious disease epidemics and community responses," the NIH said. The grants total $9.5 million over 5 years and average more than $640,000 each for the first year. The fourth grant, totaling $18.8 million over 5 years, is for developing a central database to organize information from the other three groups, the NIH reported.
The group led by Johns Hopkins will "create highly visual, user-friendly computational analyses of disease outbreaks," using historical and modern data about epidemics, the agency said. Focusing first on smallpox, dengue fever, and West Nile virus, the researchers will use the model to test the effectiveness of containment methods. The principal investigator is Donald Burke, MD.
The Los Alamos group, led by Stephen Eubank, PhD, will explore the effects of social networks in hypothetical urban areas on the spread and containment of multiple interacting pathogens.
At Emory University, a group led by Ira Longini, PhD, will model disease outbreaks in American towns ranging in population from 2,000 to 48,000 to find the best containment methods, the NIH said. The researchers will adapt their model for smallpox, SARS, pandemic influenza, and other diseases.
Research Triangle Institute will lead an informatics group that will include specialists from SAS Institute Inc., IBM, Duke University, and Emory University. Led by Diane Wagener, PhD, the group "will provide the scientific community, policy makers, and medical personnel with a wide array of computational and analytic tools and data sources tailor-made to model emerging infectious diseases and public health responses," the NIH said.
See also:
May 4 NIH news release
http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/may2004/nigms-04.htm
