The Peter Wills Bioinformatics Centre was established at Garvan in 2001. Its goal is to apply techniques derived from disciplines such as applied mathematics, statistics and computer science to understand, organise and analyse biological data.

To date, the Centre has had a number of successes including:

• upgrading the cancer histology image and pathology management system CanSto to include clinical outcome details for patients with prostate cancer. The system now allows Cancer researchers to look at the association of gene activity in tumour tissue and relate it directly to the patient’s clinical outcome

• implementing Vincent - a system for the management of bipolar disorder clinical and genetic information. It provides users with a web-based interface for the collection of mood disorder clinical interview information for storage and management within Garvan’s information architecture. The system allows researchers to test new diagnostic algorithms against the huge volume of clinical details captured from mood disorder clinics at Sydney's Prince of Wales Hospital and the University of Tasmania

• releasing the Garvan GeneSpring WorkGroup - a centralised analysis and archiving system for microarray data. Funded by the NSW Cancer Institute this resource securely houses the data of thousands of microarray chips, and allows researchers to profile genes of interest across hundreds of publicly available microarray experiments.

• Upgrading the Bone Research Program's patient data base - a system for collecting all the clinical information from participants in Garvan's Dubbo Osteoporosis Epidemiology Study. The information extracted from this database forms the basis for many of the publications from the Bone Research Program.