5 years worth of caBIG!

The deeply intertwined fields of bioinformatics and computational biology are maturing and evolving at a startling and ever-increasing rate. This progress was really evident at the recent caBIG Annual Meeting held last month here in Washington DC. As in much of biomedical informatics, the real development has been in the community. At the July meeting, we had the opportunity to see a whole range of interesting and cool things that people have been doing in the cancer informatics community- all of which represent a significant development over previous year's meetings. Similarly, it was really cool to see how groups within the program have started to develop their own collective approaches to problems that they share. In particular, the Center Deployment folks have initiated an impressive shared effort, working together to instantiate strong, relevant and shared applications throughout the country. On this 5th year anniversary for the program, I can't help but wonder what we are going to see in the next 5 years- it is certain, though, that we are coing to continue to see more and more of the kind of creative, inspired leadership and technology from the program, and that there will be even more interesting and creative solutions to the problems shared by the entire cancer informatics community displayed at future caBIG Annual Meetings!