Imre Solti (PI), John Gennari (Primary-Mentor) and Peter Tarczy-Hornoch (Mentor) are pleased to announce that their K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award application (titled "Increasing Clinical Trial Enrollment: A Semi-Automated Patient Centered Approach") was funded by the National Library of Medicine.

The grant will cover an initial two-year mentored training phase for Dr. Solti at the University of Washington under the guidance of Drs. Gennari and Tarczy-Hornoch. During the second phase the grant will cover three years of protected independent research time for Dr. Solti contingent on his successful application for a tenured track faculty position in a domestic academic institution and availability of NIH funds.

Dr. Solti will use the K99 phase to round out his bioinformatics training with Computational Linguistics course work and lay the groundwork for his independent research. The goal of the research is to semi-automate the clinical trial eligibility screening process for patients using Computational Linguistics methods on the patients' narrative text notes in the electronic medical record. The ultimate aim is to create an informatics module for patient portals, personal health records and electronic medical records that is capable of providing individualized and patient-centered clinical trial recommendations in a largely automated way. More details of the aims are presented in the public abstract, accessible at: http://staff.washington.edu/solti/ .

Dr. Solti would like to thank for the guidance of his Primary Mentor, Dr. John Gennari and Co-Mentor Dr. Peter Tarczy-Hornoch and he is looking forward to their advice in the K99 phase. He would like to acknowledge the support of his named consultants on the grant Dr. Fei Xia (Computational Linguistics, University of Washington) and Dr. Chunhua Weng (Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University). Among others the support of the MEBI Administration (Professor Fredric Wolf, Chair) and Staff (Kelly McNeill and Yu-Chan Chao), IT Services at UW Medicine (Drs. Jim Hoath and Thomas Payne), Radiation Oncology (Professor George Laramore, Chairman and Director)  and the Human Subjects Division contributed to the success of the grant application. Last but not least, Dr. Solti is grateful for the trust and financial support of the National Institute of Health and the National Library of Medicine.