Nanoinformatics: a new area of research in nanomedicine

Victor Maojo,¹ Martin Fritts,^2,3 Diana de la Iglesia,¹ Raul E Cachau,⁴ Miguel Garcia-Remesal,¹ Joyce A Mitchell,⁵ Casimir Kulikowski<sup>6

1</sup>Biomedical Informatics Group, Departamento de Inteligencia Artificial, Facultad de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain; ²SAIC-Frederick Inc, National Cancer Institute at Frederick, Frederick, Maryland, ³National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland, ⁴Advanced Biomedical Computing Center, National Cancer Institute, SAIC-Frederick Inc, Frederick, Maryland, ⁵Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah, Utah, ⁶Department of Computer Science, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Jersey, USA

Abstract: Over a decade ago, nanotechnologists began research on applications of nanomaterials for medicine. This research has revealed a wide range of different challenges, as well as many opportunities. Some of these challenges are strongly related to informatics issues, dealing, for instance, with the management and integration of heterogeneous information, defining nomenclatures, taxonomies and classifications for various types of nanomaterials, and research on new modeling and simulation techniques for nanoparticles. Nanoinformatics has recently emerged in the USA and Europe to address these issues. In this paper, we present a review of nanoinformatics, describing its origins, the problems it addresses, areas of interest, and examples of current research initiatives and informatics resources. We suggest that nanoinformatics could accelerate research and development in nanomedicine, as has occurred in the past in other fields. For instance, biomedical informatics served as a fundamental catalyst for the Human Genome Project, and other genomic and –omics projects, as well as the translational efforts that link resulting molecular-level research to clinical problems and findings.

Keywords: biomedical informatics, nanomedicine, nanotoxicology, ontologies, electronic health records