Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN)

The Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) is a geographically distributed virtual community of shared resources offering tremendous potential to advance the diagnosis and treatment of disease. BIRN is changing how biomedical scientists and clinical researchers make discoveries by enhancing communication and collaboration across research disciplines.

BIRN ...

• hosts a collaborative environment rich with tools that permit uniform access to hundreds of researchers, enabling cooperation on multi-institutional investigations.
• synchronizes developments in wide area networking, multiple data sources, and distributed computing.
• designs, tests, and releases new integrative software tools that enable researchers to pose questions and share knowledge across multiple animal models (mouse, human, and non-human primate).
• receives funding from the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), established in 2001.