Center for Bioengineering and Informatics
The mission of the Center for Bioengineering and Informatics (CBI) at Methodist is to engineer better medicine by integrating bioengineering, bioinformatics, and bioimaging to translate new molecular and cellular biology discoveries effectively from the laboratory bench to the patient bedside. Our interdisciplinary, disease-oriented approach includes the design and integration of multimodal, multiscale imaging techniques, high dimensional biotechnologies, agile medical devices, systems biology and informatics methods to quickly and efficiently acquire, analyze, and digest large volumes of heterogeneous biomedical data and information to enable prediction, prevention, detection, diagnosis, and treatment in many areas of human disease. This represents a profound shift in the practice of medicine and the improved quality of life for patients.
The CBI programs include:
- (Drug Repositioning): Investigation and development of effective computational chemistry, computational biology, bioinformatics, and high throughput/high content screening methods to identify biomarker motifs, drug targets, disease-specific signaling mechanisms, and repositioned drugs for combating human diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Retts syndrome, adult and pediatric cancers in breast, brain, lung, and bone, as well as diabetes.
- (Image-guided Therapy): Design and development of multimodal medical imaging instrumentation to enable molecular image-guided intervention for peripheral lung cancer and brain tumor.
- (Label Free Molecular Imaging): Investigation and development of label free biophotonic techniques, such as CARS (coherent anti-stokes Raman scattering) spectromicroscopes and in vivo microendoscopes, for cancer interventions in breast, prostate, and lung and for nerve impairment avoidance during surgery.
- (Image Informatics): Research and development of image analysis algorithms and network modeling methods to identify biomarkers, delineate disease mechanisms, and aid diagnostic and treatment planning of brain disorders, such as Autism and Alzhei mer’s, and cancer, such as lung cancer and glioblastoma.
- (Clinical Informatics): Design and development of the next generation of integrative biomedical database and data warehouse systems to support comparative effectiveness and outcomes research for evidence-based resource allocation decisions and for selection of optimal treatment procedures.
The CBI is part of the Department of Systems Medicine and Bioengineering of The Methodist Hospital Research Institute at The Methodist Hospital in Houston.
