The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is funding a $15 million initiative to create a national network of valuable scientific resources. The eagle-i Consortium, named by principal investigator Lee M. Nadler after the bird’s extraordinary eyesight and ability to “discover the invisible,” is expected to provide scientists with access to a wealth of information.
The network’s resources, derived from collaborative institutional input, will include cell lines, tissue banks, and techniques, among others. The network will attempt to provide a new form of rapid resource discovery that will save researchers time and money. With a nationally-searchable network, scientists would no longer be inadvertently redeveloping laboratory resources that already exist elsewhere and redundancy could be virtually eliminated, according to Nadler.
“I think it completely changes the nature of research [when] people can solve each others’ problems,” Nadler told BioTechniques. “They just don’t know who each other are [if] they don’t work together. People are amazing, but they don’t come together naturally because the incentive system of academics says ‘work a lot.’”
A press release issued by Harvard offers the following scenario: “A scientist will be able to use the portal to search across the inventories of all nine sites and see whether a laboratory or facility at one of them has the cell line he needs.”
Nadler recruited a team of researchers to build upon the principles of an established scientific network, the Harvard Catalyst. Harvard Catalyst was founded in May 2008 with a five-year, $117.5 million grant from the Clinical and Translational Science Center (CTSC) division of the NIH.
The team plans to meet with the creators of VIVO, a complementary $12.2 million scientist-networking endeavor, on Dec. 8 and 9 to collaborate while both projects are still in the early building stages. Nadler called the entities “synergistic.”
Despite the two-year allotment, Nadler expects the primary eagle-i Consortium network to be live by December.
“We’re working like a company, not like a university,” he added. “We’re moving fast.”
After the two-year development period, the National Center for Research Resources (NCCR) division of the NIH will maintain the eagle-i Consortium.
Nadler’s group includes researchers from Dartmouth College, Jackson State University, the Morehouse School of Medicine, Oregon Health and Science University, the University of Alaska, the University of Hawaii, and the University of Puerto Rico.
