Bioinformatics and g-Commerce: Mapping Our Future

Wouldn't it be great to live to be over 100 and lead an independent, ailment-free existence?

Reportedly gene sequencing of many species has been completed or is near completion. In the near future, a patient could walk into a hospital and get his genome sequence as he would do for an X-Ray, so that the doctor could make immediate decisions about the course of the treatment based specifically on the patient's genes.

The fast emerging multi disciplinary areas of Bio Informatics, Genomics and High Performance computing are moving toward safer drug design and designer drugs based on the patient's unique genetic makeup. This has been made possible directly because of the advances in computing technology in the areas of grid computing, data mining and automated mapping and sequencing. It took phenomenal computational power for scientists to slice and dice 3.1 billion pairs of base chemicals for the Human Genome project. Now its fast becoming evident that super computing and bioware hold the key to designer drugs that would cure diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes by modifying our DNA. All the major hardware vendors including IBM, HP, Sun, and Cray are aggressively investing in developing powerful super computers capable of peak processing capabilities beyond today's computing lexicon.

IBM is developing the $100 million Blue Gene which will be 1000 times more powerful than Deep Blue, which defeated legendary chess master Kasparov. Blue Gene will be capable of 1 Pflops (1015 floating point operations per sec) processing power, which is 12.3 times faster than Tflops super computer and five million times faster than a PC. The super computer has been custom designed to get maximum throughput for minimum silicon. Because of judicious instruction choices, the chips in Blue Gene will contain only fifty-seven instructions as opposed to today's RISC and CISC chips which have hundreds of them.

IBM is not alone, Compaq's Alpha processors powered the historical genome project and Sun has committed to the life sciences by forming the Informatics Advisory Council which will address the data analysis needs of the life sciences community and to discuss the future standards of hardware and software platforms.

Standards for data interchange are critical for scientists who need to work with large volumes of data in different formats from a variety of sources. An international consortium of over 40 life science and IT organizations have formed the Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium (I3C). I3C will develop common protocols and interoperable technologies for data exchange for the life sciences community. Though the human genome has been sequenced, scientists now face even greater challenges to use the information to prevent and cure diseases. A myriad of different data sources in different formats have been setup to support different aspects of genomics, proteomics, and the drug design process.

Genomics is the study of the structure, function, and interaction of the genes in a being. Proteomics, in its simplest definition, aims to uncover all of the proteins in a being and their functions, and bio informatics is the large-scale storage, retrieval and processing of data from genomics and proteomics. The dissection and interpretation of the data from genomics (abt the genes) and proteomics (abt protein), using tools and application provided by Bioinformatics, is crucial for drug discovery, gene therapy and to find cures for diseases.

A scientist may have to access data from multiple locations ranging from flat files, relational databases, 2D and 3D chemical structures to various other data formats. Extracting information from these multiple and specialized resources solves only part of the problem. To derive real value from these raw data sources, we must integrate the data from the various sources to give meaningful biological information scientist require.

Several companies are working on these issues and solutions such as eLabBook and DiscoveryLink. They are able to allow different types of data to be retrieved from multiple locations and are able to integrate on the fly, right from the desktop of the life scientists. With technology products such as DiscoveryLink, scientists will have access to information with a single query from multiple locations in different formats including structured data, 3D files, 2D files, tables, flat files, etc.

Despite the availability of a rough draft of the human genome today, the life sciences industry faces several IT challenges, including data integration, storage capabilities, computational throughput and skilled personnel with interdisciplinary skills (IT and bio sciences).

As shared, vendors are at work to address these hurdles by delivering processing power and software integration tools as well as by setting standards for interoperability for life sciences industry. The interleaving of life sciences with information technology is set to revolutionize and transform lives through drug discovery, gene therapy and by providing treatment that will be tailor made to your genetic profile.

In Singapore, Genovate offers Bioinformatics training in Bio-Java, Bio-XML, and Bio-Perl.