Dive Brief:

• The National Institutes of Health awarded $32 million worth of grants on Thursday for researchers developing new strategies to analyze biomedical big data sets.
• The grants are designed to help researchers at colleges, universities, and other institutions capitalize on new technologies in biomedical research that have created vast amounts of frequently inaccessible data.
• The NIH says its Big Data to Knowledge initiative, dubbed BD2K, could invest nearly $656 million through 2020, depending on funding availability.

Dive Insight:

BD2K has four components. The Centers of Excellence for Big Data Computing is made up of 11 centers at nine universities — Stanford University and the University of Southern California each have two — developing tools for big data science. The BD2K-LINCS Perturbation Data Coordination and Integration Center will coordinate a library of how cells, tissues, and networks respond to drugs and other factors. The BD2K Data Discovery Index Coordination Consortium, including projects at eight universities, will develop an index for discovering and citing biomedical research data. Training and workforce development awards will go to educating future data science researchers.