Senator Percy Mockler, on behalf of the Gary Goodyear, Minister of State (Science and Technology), has announced the opening of a new bioinformatics laboratory in Moncton that will create new technologies to assist health-care providers in diagnosing and treating diseases more quickly and accurately. The laboratory is a joint initiative among the National Research Council (NRC), l’Université de Moncton (UdeM), the Atlantic Cancer Research Institute (ACRI) and the University of New Brunswick (UNB).
“Our government supports science and technology because they improve the quality of life for Canadians, create jobs and strengthen the economy,” said Senator Mockler. “This new research lab at the Université de Moncton will bring important health care and economic benefits for New Brunswickers, and for people around the world.”
“Collaborative research projects such as this increase the competitiveness of a region, creating a dynamic location where companies, government, and universities can network, invest and bring innovative technologies to market,” said NRC President Dr. Pierre Coulombe. “This will result in new knowledge, new skills, new partnerships and new business opportunities focused on the priorities of Canadians.”
The Bioinformatics Lab is a key piece of high-tech infrastructure that will expand health and wellness research and development capabilities in the region. Bioinformatics is a scientific field in which information technology, computer science, mathematics, molecular biology and medicine emerge into a single discipline to analyze biological information. It plays a vital role in making sense of large amounts of data very quickly.
With state-of-the-art tools, the Bioinformatics Lab will support the research and development of new data analysis, data mining, and knowledge discovery techniques to meet challenges in the growing field of bioinformatics. The laboratory will attract skilled researchers to New Brunswick and offer new research opportunities to students in science, engineering and computer science. To support this project, NRC will be providing workstations and software technologies for researchers and partners to use for projects in bioinformatics.
The tools available at the lab can be used not only in health research, but for energy and the environment and wherever there is a need to process a large amount of data or perform multi-criteria processing.
