One of the more powerful weapons in the fight against the damage from diabetes is a bank of computer servers inside a room at Medical College of Georgia. And they have also pulled in the school's largest grant so far.

The servers are part of the Coordinating and Bioinformatics Unit of the Animal Models of Diabetic Complications Consortium, now funded by a $15 million grant over five years from the National Institutes of Health. That would make it the largest ever for the school, said Frank Treiber, vice president for research, although part of the money will be subcontracted out to other institutions.

Since 2001, the MCG unit has coordinated the research activities of 13 labs, helping them store, organize and most importantly analyze and share the data they are generating, said Richard McIndoe, associate director of the Center for Biotechnology and Genomic Medicine at MCG, who oversees the unit.

The database allows them to "look at it in various ways that they may not have been able to do if they had had it just stored on an Excel spreadsheet, which most laboratories just dump all of their data into Excel," Dr. McIndoe said.

And that is a major problem with thousands and thousands of pieces of data that Dr. McIndoe is helping to solve, Dr. Treiber said.

"How do you integrate that together so investigators can analyze it more effectively and efficiently to look at the genetic and behavioral links related to (diabetic complications) so that you can then develop the interventions, the therapeutics quicker," he said. "That is a major part of these activities and he is a leader in the nation in that."

But one of the first moves for the consortium was to create a mouse model to study diabetic complications, Dr. McIndoe said.

"There was very few, if any, because most people when they are doing animal models, it's for diabetes, not the complications from diabetes," he said. "The principal reason for part of that is most of the complications are time-driven. And mice don't really live long enough to get the complications. So they have to do some genetic manipulations to kind of bypass that time factor."

It also needs to be relevant to people, Dr. McIndoe said.

"They mimic what would be in the human clinic," he said. "You don't die from diabetes. You die from the complications."

Though it is difficult to even guess how much is now being stored and analyzed through the center, it is not hard to see the impact it will have by providing better models and a public Web portal where anyone can access the work, Dr. McIndoe said.

"Now you've got multiple people all over the world working with this animal model, generating data on that complication in that state, which will definitely speed things up," he said.

Reach Tom Corwin at (706) 823-3213 or tom.corwin@augustachronicle.com.