Welcome to the open-access journal titled Journal of Clinical Bioinformatics (JCBi),
a truly international journal devoted to clinical applications of bioinformatics,
medical informatics and the development of bioinformatics tools, methodologies and
approaches for clinical research. JCBi aims to discover how biological and medical
informatics can be applied to the development of personalized healthcare, medication
and therapies. The field of clinical bioinformatics includes the analysis of human
microarray and other omics data, combination of bioinformatics and medical informatics,
development of bioinformatics methodologies for clinical research, and human databases.
JCBi also aims to establish a scientific channel to translate bioinformatics to clinical
and medical application in order to better understand molecular and cellular mechanisms
and therapies for human diseases.
Clinical bioinformatics is a new emerging science combining clinical informatics,
bioinformatics, medical informatics, information technology, mathematics, and omics
science together. At the beginning of the 20th century, clinical physicians needed
to be informed and open to advances in omics technology despite the barriers which
existed for physicians applying genetic tests, for example the low tolerance for uncertainty,
negative attitudes about their responsibility for genetic counseling and testing,
and unfamiliarity with ethical issues raised by testing [1]. Since the middle of the
20th century, bioinformatics was suggested to be applied for clinical toxicology [2]
and cancer [3]. One of the early studies on expressed sequence tags in human stem
cells by bioinformatics was performed in 1998 [4], where near 10000 sequences were
analyzed. Of these, 48% showed the identity to known genes in the GenBank database,
26.4% matched to the previously deposited in a public domain database, 14% were previously
undescribed sequences, and the remaining 12% were mitochondrial DNA, ribosomal RNA,
or repetitive sequences. At the beginning of the 21st century, gene expression profiles
in 60 human cancer cell lines used in a drug discovery screen were evaluated by cDNA
microarrays and corrected with drug activity patterns by combining bioinformatics
and chemoinformatics [5]. Clinical bioinformatics was initially proposed to provide
biological and medical information for individualized healthcare, enable researchers
to search online biological databases and use bioinformatics in medical practice,
select appropriate software to analyze the microarray data for medical decision-making,
optimize the development of disease-specific biomarkers, and supervise drug target
identification and clinical validation [6].
Clinical bioinformatics plays an important role in a number of clinical applications,
including omics technology, metabolic and signaling pathways, biomarker discovery
and development, computational biology, genomics, proteomics, metaboliomics, pharmacomics,
transcriptomics, high-throughput image analysis, human molecular genetics, human tissue
bank, mathematical medicine and biology, protein expression and profiling and systems
biology. Understanding the interaction between clinical informatics and bioinformatics
is the first and critical step to discover and develop the new diagnostics and therapies
for diseases. Clinical bioinformatics was suggested to be associated with the analysis
and visualization of complex medical datasets [7]. Different from other informatics,
clinical bioinformatics should focus more on clinical informatics, including patient
complaints, history, therapies, clinical symptoms and signs, physician's examinations,
biochemical analyses, imaging profiles, pathologies and other measurements. It was
emphasized that the simultaneous evaluation of clinical and basic research could improve
medical care, care provision data, and data exploitation methods in disease therapy
and algorithms for the analysis of such heterogeneous data sets [8]. This particular
study tried to match disease complexity of patient information, clinical data, standard
laboratory evaluations, brain imaging data and genetic data obtained from molecular
profiling experiments. It is a huge difficulty and challenge to compel the clinical
and biomedical data generated with bioinformatics from omics analyses. Clinical bioinformatics
failed to show the importance, significance and clear relationships between clinical
observations and the underlying molecular mechanisms due to the lack of integrated
analysis and digitalized informatics of clinical descriptions and measurements. Thus,
there is a great need for a scientific channel and platform like Journal of Clinical
Bioinformatics, to exchange information on the development, standardization, application,
and optimization of clinical bioinformatics for informaticists, bioinformaticsts,
cellular and molecular biologists, pharmacologists, and clinicians.
Clinical bioinformatics is a new way to focus on the combination of clinical measurements
and signs with human tissue-generated bioinformatics, understand clinical symptoms
and signs, disease development and progress, and therapeutic strategy, and map relationships
that integrate discrete elements that collectively direct global function within a
particular -omic category, with clinical examinations, pathology, biochemical analysis,
imaging and therapies. The JCBi perspective allows inspection and prediction of disease
conditions, not limited to a monogenic challenge, but as a combination of individualized
molecular permutations acting in concert to affect a phenotypic outcome. Bioinformatic
integration of multidimensional data within and between molecular biology and medicine
thus harbors the potential to identify unique biological signatures, providing an
enabling platform for advances in clinical and translational science. There is a great
need to have a special communication platform for both bioinformatics scientists and
clinicians to exchange their knowledge and experience on the development of new biotechnologies,
gene and protein functions, cell and organ dysfunction, and pathology, related to
clinical signs, symptoms, findings, measures, prognosis and therapeutic effects.
The term "Clinical bioinformatics" is defined here as "clinical application of bioinformatics-associated
sciences and technologies to understand molecular mechanisms and potential therapies
for human diseases", a new and important concept for the development of disease-specific
biomarkers, mechanism-oriented understanding and individualized medicine. There is
solid evidence that the generation and expansion of genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic
data from human studies by high-throughput biotechnologies have increased enormously.
In parallel, clinical measurements and examined information are elevated by the development
of advanced clinical devices. Acquisition of high-dimensional datasets to combine
both clinical and biomedical information and outcomes requires a communication platform
as archival systems that permit efficiency of storage and retrieval. Multiple electronic
repositories have been initiated and maintained. The number of published scientific
papers related to "Clinical bioinformatics" significantly increases every year. JCBi
provides a forum for exchange of ideas on potential molecular and cellular mechanisms,
biomarker identification and validation, and drug discovery and development by the
application of clinical bioinformatics. JCBi will also aim to play an important, critical,
and recognized role in the improvement of understanding molecular mechanisms of diseases
and development of new medicines. In addition, the journal is directed toward those
specialists who work with disease-related bioinformatics, mathematics, biostatistics
and molecular biology, those who explore drug discovery and development, pharmacology
and toxicology, and pharmaceutical science, those who treat patients in the clinic
and develop individualized medicine, and those who investigate molecular and cellular
mechanisms involved in the development and reversibility of epithelium-involved diseases.
There is an urgent and immediate need to create a forum to stimulate discussion and
exchange of scientific findings and understandings of clinical bioinformatics with
a clear goal of treating diseases and improving the quality of patients. JCBi is the
only journal focusing on the clinical application of bioinformatics and keeping track
of the wealth of new information related to this topic. This is particularly the case
when we observe the rapid development of new biotechnologies, e.g. genomics, proteomics,
and celleomics, and the increasing capacities of clinical investigations. We believe
that the JCBi will play an important, critical, and recognized role in understanding
the molecular mechanisms of the diseases and developing the individual medicine and
therapeutic strategy.
JCBi is also proud to be affiliated with the newly established International Society
of Translational Medicine (ISTM) [9] and will be a prominent publication for its Omics
Science section. As a non-profit organization, ISTM is a network of clinicians and
researchers from all science fields with an interest in translational medicine. The
partnership between JCBi and ISTM will assist with the interdisciplinary research
across bioinformatics and translational medicine.
In conclusion, we as editors of JCBi, are delighted to welcome you to this new and
novel journal and thank the scientists who have agreed to publish in the journal.
In setting up the journal, we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to all professors
and scientists for their encouragement, support, comments, suggestions, and contributions.
With great support from our Associate Editors and Editorial Board Members [10], we
deeply believe that JCBi will be well-received both by preclinical, clinical and pharmaceutical
scientists interested in clinical bioinformatics and contribute to better outcome
for understanding the diseases and developing new therapies. Involvement and contributions
from a large group of scientists who work on clinical bioinformatics are crucial to
the success of the journal.
Xiangdong Wang MD, PhD
Lance Liotta, PhD
Co-Editors-in-Chief
Journal of Clinical Bioinformatics