-Scientists are using technology to trawl through very large databanks, referring to endless epidemiological studies, in their wake the pharmaceutical industry requires large population studies, looking for a few subtle correlations."
With big names like Oracle, IBM and Compaq all jumping on the lifesciences bandwagon, the increasing convergence between the infotech and biotech sectors is reaching the point where there the rate of new breakthroughs in life sciences are almost entirely dependent on increases in computing power.
-IT and biology are becoming so intertwined that the pace of discoveries is now being determined by the speed of IT development," says Dr David Dembo, marketing manager for life sciences at IBM Asia Pacific.
In fact, Bioscience is one of the few sectors where IT spending is growing, and set to increase further. Quoting from Frost & Sullivan research, Dembo says the biosciences sector currently spends more than US$22 billion on IT infrastructure, and that the market is set to double within the next two years.
Nonetheless, the relationship between IT and biosciences is not new, according to Dr Robin Craig, research director at Queensland-based company Genesearch. Dr Craig points out that a significant amount of computing goes into controlling the enclosed environments on which much of biology is based.
-We started to control our fermenters by computer back with the Apple II, obviously there are new aspects to the technology today, but much of the principal is the same," Dr Craig said. -Like any other business much of our operations are also computerised, and the use of the Internet to transfer information is crucial to all scientific fields."
However, Dr Craig points out the relationship between the two sectors has changed substantially since the rise of fields like genomics and proteomics.
-Biology has always required technology, but when you are talking sequencing genes and trying to find out what they do, we are looking at a whole branch of the science that is totally dependent on technology," Dr Craig says.
Replacement or reinforcement?
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was recently quoted as saying that information technology would shortly give way to biotechnology as the great economic engine, however, many within the field envision a more convergent outcome.
The ongoing struggle to create the -very small" has seen improvements in CPU manufacturing, and also assisted in the creation of gadgets aimed at prolonging life and overcoming disease.
While at this stage it appears that biomedical nanotechnology will be derived from chemical processes, ongoing attempts to create on scales approaching an atomic level have enabled the IT industry to continue its eternal pursuit of Moore's Law. And it is a relationship which goes further than smaller CPUs.
Biomedical nanotechnology is faced with the paradox that manufacturing at the atomic level must be carried out by machines made of atoms, which are substantially larger that the target objects. However, research in this area is assisting in the creation of ever smaller processing units, which in turn feed back into the biotech industry in the guise of diagnostic gadgets and physical implants.
Ambri's Dr Cornell points out however, that smaller and more portable are not always desirable when it comes to a hospital environment.
-In contrast to what you might expect people in the clinical environment don't want something so small they can put it in their pocket, because it will be too difficult to keep track of," Dr Cornell says. -When it comes to a diagnostic device they want something about the size of the telephone, that can be screwed onto the wall, and fulfil a range of different diagnostic requirements."
While there are correlations between nanotech, biotech and medical device manufacturing, by far the greatest cross-dependence of IT and life sciences comes from the realms where increasing processing requirements are driving supercomputer development.
Harry Karelis, managing director of ASX-listed company BioTech Capital, says that the vast amount of data processing required for modelling cell-based activities, such as organ function, has lead to the creation of task specific relational databases, designed specifically for the biotech sector.
-Whereas in the past we were often dealing with random screening, a lot of the most recent drug and biological research is about matching the right keys with the right locks," Karelis said.
According to Karelis, developments in the IT sector are increasingly being driven by the need for databases with the capacity to match biological keys, such as certain proteins, to biological locks, such as the protective mechanism surrounding bacteria.
-We are taking months if not years off the drug development timeframe," Karelis said. -Not only is this kind of data processing helping to eliminate false positives but also save lot of time and money currently wasted looking for dud leads."
In fact many within biosciences would argue that the level of complexity required to drive this kind of research is in fact driving the next phase of IT development.
Proteomics: the next phase
-There are about one hundred thousand proteins in the make up of a human being," Ambri's Dr Cornell explains. -It is as though someone handed you a bag full with all the screws, sockets, nuts and bolts of a car, and asked you to describe what each one did and where it went."
Continuing with the metaphor, Dr Cornell says that without computers, protein research would be like reaching into the bag and hoping to pull out a complimentary pair.
-There will be massive growth in the requirement for data, and data management, in order to discover the effects different proteins have on each other," Dr Cornell said.
The increasing importance of the IT environment to map the relationships between diseases, pharmaceuticals, genes and proteins is such that experiments are now carried out 'in silico'.
-Traditionally we relied on the research conducted 'in vitro', that is in labs, or 'in vivo', in humans, however the IT systems behind life sciences research are now sufficiently complex that we are looking at experiments conducted totally 'in silico', or within the computational environment," says IBM's Dr Dembo.
So interested is IBM in the emerging area of proteomics, that in November last year it announced a global alliance with Sydney-based Proteome Systems, agreeing to provide the IT backbone for the company's commercial offerings.
-Not only is proteomics driving the requirement for vast amounts of data, but the speed of discovery is increasingly determined by the level of sophistication of those applications in terms of data management and storage," Dr Dembo says.
When it comes to sheer processing power however, Dr Dembo points out that proteomics is driving the development of cutting edge pentaflop computing.
-The current range of high performance computers are rated in teraflops," Dr Denbo says. -But in order to serve the needs of the biotech sector we will need to bring the world's first pentaflop computer into operation."
And while Dr Denbo agrees there has always been some link between IT and the biological sciences, he believes there is no real precedent for the scale and sophistication of more recent developments.
HI,
Does anyone know where I can get information on setting up a VIVO card? It is an MX440.