Global push

At the same time, the caBIG program is in the midst of an expansion to add links to the grid and its 40-plus applications to community health care providers. Sixteen have signed up to date to join the program.

And national cancer centres in the UK are in the process of building an infrastructure to become "caBIG-enabled," Beutow said.

Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, noted that projects like caBIG are critical to science, but still have a long way to go.

"We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of how we can cooperate and share data," he said. Taking advantage of the "explosion of information" generated by genomic research is going to take a tremendous amount of infrastructure development -- and time.

"I am 61 years old [and] I would hope we are able to see some of this connectivity before I am gone from this earth," he said. "It is going to take us another generation until we see the type of applications where we can put it directly into affecting patient care."

Nonetheless, the NCI's parent organisation, the National Institutes of Health, is already holding up caBIG as a model for sharing research and treatment data associated with other illnesses like cardiovascular disease.

"This change in medicine is revolutionary," Beutow said. "We have the capacity now to look and see how an individual might respond to a particular therapeutic approach."

David Steffen, director of the Bioinformatics Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said his organisation was now working under the caBIG auspices to find a way to use the grid to share cardiovascular disease research data.

Steffen envisions a time where this type of technology could evolve to support some of the genetic advances made famous in the 1997 science fiction cult classic Gattaca, where DNA analysis at birth could predict disease likelihood.

"The goal is to look at this [genetic] sequence and say, 'Ah ha, you have this combination of genes which predisposes you to heart disease,'" Steffen said. "It won't be much longer before we'll be able to routinely do that at birth. [The caBIG grid] is going to have complete, unexpected and very dramatic [effects] on the pace of medical research."

CaBIG is also has working with the US government's Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT -- which oversees the development of electronic health records -- to ensure that the EHRs can include details about a person's genetic makeup.