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Arthritis and Immunology Research Program

Jonathan D. Wren, Ph.D. Assistant Member, Arthritis and Immunology Research Program

Research Interests
Arguably, the biggest bottleneck in biomedical discovery is no longer getting data but making sense of a huge and growing body of data. When it comes to answering questions about what causes human disease, the upside is that data gathered in pursuit of answering one question can potentially be used to answer many more. So in that sense, more is better. The downside, however, is that questions are answered by focusing on specific data or observations, thus more data spread across different sources makes it harder to know not only what data exists but what data is relevant to your question. My research in bioinformatics focuses both on developing methods to take advantage of this abundant and growing body of biomedical data as well as deal with these challenges.

Because the relevant findings of scientific research are almost always summarized in published form and increasingly available electronically, part of my work focuses on developing new methods of text mining, or data-mining using the scientific literature as a data source, to model this data. Computers can easily process 16 million published papers but cannot understand implications or weigh evidence in ways that humans can. Humans, however, have neither the time nor interest to read anywhere near 16 million papers and wouldn’t remember every detail even if they could. So my work in this area has focused on finding the middle ground – getting computers to do the reading and assimilate the data and/or implications in summary form for humans. One of the programs we have developed, IRIDESCENT, uses known biomedical relationships to infer what is not known but is plausible. It has so far successfully identified several novel relationships, some of which have been validated experimentally (e.g. that a drug known for its neuroactive properties could also affect the progression of a cardiac illness).

Finally, because of this growing abundance of data, there are more and more findings that are not reported in the traditional journal format. Rather, they are deposited in specialized databases (DNA sequences, microarray data, protein-protein interactions, etc). Recently, we have begun to focus on ways to integrate this information into a framework that will help make sense of the diseases that OMRF is working to cure.

Joined OMRF Scientific Staff in 2007.

Mailing Address
Arthritis and Immunology Research Program, MS 58
Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation
825 N.E. 13th Street
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73104

Contact Information
Phone: (405) 271-6989
Fax: (405) 271-4110
E-mail: Jonathan-Wren@omrf.org