The Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) has launched a website that highlights its broadened focus, including services for the entire biomedical community and enhanced data-sharing and analysis tools and capabilities.

The launch represents BIRN's first public action since the enterprise was re-funded by the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a unit of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), in early 2009.

As part of the re-funding, BIRN moved to USC's Information Sciences Institute, a part of the Viterbi School of Engineering.

The site at www.birncommunity.org/ displays new partnerships with key research organizations in cardiology and primate research, and

Carl Kesselman

emphasizes that BIRN offers assistance to biomedical research groups and consortia of all sizes and biomedical research specialties.

It also conveys BIRN's shift to from a hardware-based to a software-based infrastructure that enables users to connect across geographic and/or diverse, incompatible computing systems.

A slide presentation by BIRN co-Principal Investigator (PI) Carl Kesselman, Ph.D., , a project leader at ISI and professor at the USC Daniel Epstein School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, which describes the new thrust is available here.

BIRN is a collaborative effort between NCRR and a leadership consortium that includes in addition to ISI, the University of Chicago, Massachusetts General Hospital, University of California at Irvine, and University of California at Los Angeles.

Participants represent some of the nation's premier technical and healthcare research universities, hospitals and other institutions, ranging from small research groups to large, well-established research consortia