An $18.8 million grant to build a center at Stanford University that would develop computer systems to help biomedical researchers share results of their work more easily has been awarded to the Stanford School of Medicine.

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology will be located at Stanford, but with other universities participating. The grant is from the National Institutes of Health.

“It felt like a call from Ed McMahon,” said Mark Musen, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of medical informatics who will lead the center.

The center will design new computer systems to compare and analyze data from large biomedical experiments.

For decades, scientists have independently designed computer systems to store and analyze data. The goal of the center is integrate existing databases of biomedical experiments so the results can be more easily compared.

“Simply put, ontologies are ways of structuring knowledge so that computers can use it,” Musen said. His research group has developed Protégé, the most widely used ontology-development software in the world.

— Don Kazak