He urged that health care organizations use caBIG and other IT resources to further extend biomedical research, following the lead of the financial services industry and the US Department of Defense.

Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, noted that projects like caBIG are critical to science, but still have a long way to go.

"We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of how we can cooperate and share data," he added. Taking advantage of the "explosion of information" generated by genomic research is going to take a tremendous amount of infrastructure development -- and time, he said.

"I am 61 years old [and] I would hope we are able to see some of this connectivity before I am gone from this earth," he noted. "It is going to take us another generation until we see the type of applications where we can put it directly into affecting patient care."

Nonetheless, the NCI's parent organization, the National Institutes of Health, is already holding up caBIG as a model for sharing research and treatment data associated with other illnesses like cardiovascular disease.

"This change in medicine is revolutionary," says Ken Beutow, director of NCI's Center for Bioinformatics. "We have the capacity now to look and see how an individual might respond to a particular therapeutic approach."

David Steffen, director of the Bioinformatics Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine in the US, noted that his organization is now working under the caBIG auspices to find a way to use the grid to share cardiovascular disease research data.

Steffen envisions a time where this type of technology could evolve to support some of the genetic advances made famous in the 1997 science fiction cult classic Gattaca, where DNA analysis at birth could predict disease likelihood.

"The goal is to look at this [genetic] sequence and say, 'Ah ha, you have this combination of genes which predisposes you to heart disease,'" Steffen noted. "It won't be much longer before we'll be able to routinely do that at birth. [The caBIG grid] is going to have complete, unexpected and very dramatic impacts on the pace of medical research."

CaBIG is also has working with President Bush's Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT - which oversees the development of electronic health records - to ensure that the EHRscan include details about a person's genetic makeup.