The Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative (BISTI) is a consortium of representatives from each of the NIH institutes and centers. BISTI was established in May 2000 to serve as the focus of biomedical computing issues at the NIH. The mission of BISTI is to make optimal use of computer science and technology to address problems in biology and medicine by fostering new basic understandings, collaborations, and transdisciplinary initiatives between the computational and biomedical sciences.