Nanoinformatics: a new area of research in nanomedicine

TLDR

Nanoinformatics has emerged in the USA and Europe to address informatics challenges in nanomedicine, such as managing heterogeneous data, defining nomenclatures, and developing modeling and simulation techniques for nanoparticles. This review aims to describe the origins of nanoinformatics, the problems it addresses, its areas of interest, and examples of current research initiatives and informatics resources. The authors survey existing literature and resources, outlining the field’s development, key challenges, and illustrative projects that demonstrate how informatics can support nanomedicine research. The authors argue that nanoinformatics has the potential to accelerate research and development in nanomedicine, mirroring its impact in other biomedical domains. Keywords: biomedical informatics, nanomedicine, nanotoxicology, ontologies, electronic health records.

Abstract

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