Biomedical informatics professor receives Bridge Award

Valentin Dinu, assistant professor in ASU’s Department of Biomedical Informatics, has been awarded a Virginia G. Piper Personalized Medicine Bridge Award. The award amount of about $170,000 will enable Dinu to obtain the additional data necessary to resubmit and strengthen his research proposal to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Dinu’s project, titled “Next-generation optical sensing and informatics for genomic sequencing,” aims to develop informatics and imaging approaches that can significantly accelerate the collection and analysis of genome-sequencing data. The proposed improvements may remove a critical bottleneck in the speed and cost at which the genomes of individual persons can be sequenced, making genomic testing available on a wide-scale basis for large populations of patients.

Dinu hopes this development will facilitate the discovery of new, highly targeted drugs, and improve strategies for eradicating diseases ranging from cancer and heart disease, to Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes, by increasing the effectiveness of therapies for individual patients.

The award was instituted April 1 and will conclude in December, with an opportunity for grant renewal in 2013.