The mission of the Center for Bioengineering and Informatics (CBI) at Methodist is to engineer better medicine and the tools of biological research and to advance health and biomedical informatics. In doing this, we hope to be a global leader in discovering and creating innovations in drug repositioning and combinations, methods for imaging and probing the body and the brain, devices supporting cellular and molecular diagnostic and therapeutic intervention, and informatics solutions for disease detection, diagnosis, modeling, and prediction. We believe that the fusion of engineering, informatics, and imaging hold the key to translate scientific research effectively and quickly from laboratory bench into patient bedside.

The research focus of CBI includes:

• The development of new methods and tools to identify biomarker motifs and drug leads for combating neurological disorders, cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

• The development of the next generation devices and instrumentation for on-the-spot diagnosis and molecular image-guided therapy.

Our inter-disciplinary, disease-oriented approach includes the design and integration of multimodal, multiscale imaging techniques, high dimensional biotechnologies, agile medical devices, systems biology, and computational methods to quickly and efficiently acquire, analyze, and digest large volumes of heterogeneous biomedical data and information into knowledge that enables prediction, prevention, detection, diagnosis, and treatment in many areas of human disease. This would represent a profound shift in the practice of medicine and the improved quality life for patients.

The CBI is part of the Bioengineering and Informatics Programmatic Core of The Methodist Hospital Research Institute at The Methodist Hospital in Houston.