Turning Big Data into Cures
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago are building a database of information that could one day help provide insight into neurological disorders, including epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. By linking tissue samples from patients treated for neurological disorders at the University of Illinois Hospital to the patient’s clinical, radiological, electrical, histological and genetic information – researchers create troves of “big data” that can be stored and queried, yielding new findings about how disorders occur and how they might be treated. The samples and their linked data in the University of Illinois NeuroRepository provide unsurpassed value to the research community and have already led to the discovery of new epilepsy biomarkers and drug targets.