of Sciences. All rights reserved. This summary plus thousands more available at http://www.nap.edu mittee envisions these data repositories as essential infrastructure, necessary both for creating the New Taxonomy and, more broadly, for integrating basic biological knowledge with medical histories and health outcomes of individual patients. The Committee believes that building this infrastructure—the Infor- mation Commons and Knowledge Network—is a grand challenge that, if met, would both modernize the ways in which biomedical research is conducted and, over time, lead to dramatically improved patient care (see Figure S-1). The Committee envisions this ambitious program, which would play out on a time scale of decades rather than years, as proceeding through a blend of top-down and bottom-up activity. A major top-down component, initiated by public and private agencies that fund and regulate biomedical research, would be required to ensure that results of individual projects could be combined to Figure S-1, 1-3 Bitmapped FIGURE S-1 Creation of a New Taxonomy first requires an “Information Commons” in which data on large populations of patients become broadly available for research use and a “Knowledge Network” that adds value to these data by highlighting their inter-connectedness and integrating them with evolving knowledge of fundamental biological processes. SOURCE: Committee on A Framework for Developing a New Taxonomy of Disease. multiple layers of ‘omic and clinical data provide inference that provide data-driven taxonomic disease classes facilitating more precise care delivery more data for refining disease models and kickstart a virtuous cycle for integrating basic research more rapidly into actionable insights DUKE Cancer Precision Medicine