Biotechnology: the new frontier
After posting the articles: “The new revolution in Technology” many students have asked me about the relationship between Biology and Information Technology, two completely different fields. The Biology field has changed significantly as the result of the Human Genome Project in 2000. Today scientists view Biology as an informational science, DNA is basically a digital four-letter language (C,T,G,A) storing information on chromosomes similar to the binary (0,1) in computer languages. Therefore, genes express themselves just like computers executing software programs. These expressions integrate with others to create a particular kind of “informational pathway” that signals the body to perform certain function.
Anything wrong with these pathway create problem or disease. By understand how these genes work, we can look at diseases from a different perspective. By understand the detail genes that predispose to disease, we can predict health history and it could change the way we treat disease today. Within our body, there are trillion of these interconnected “informational pathways” that form networks. To understand this new view of biology, we have to understand these information at different levels, from cells to organs so we can understand how they work. If we understand these “informational pathways”, we may be able to change them thus prevent disease from happening. This is the beginning of the new drug discovery principle.
Today there is a convergent of Biology and Information Technology into a new field called Biotechnology because all the interactions within our body is really the information technology (IT) problems. That is why I believe all future biotechnology scientists should have knowledge of computer to work on their research. If we can define body systems through a mathematic modeling we can predict some emergent properties, and make a breakthrough in the way we deal with diseases. Of course, our body is a complex system and we only just begun to explore it from this new angle of information technology. Today in every research lab, there are many information available, some store at different databases, some at personal computers, and they have not been integrated, organized, categorized for further study. This is where I think information technology could add values. Even our brain is limited, we cannot process large and complex information but a computer can. It can process billion of data, sort through thousands of articles to find what we are looking for. With the use of computer and sophisticated algorithms, we can save significant amount of time in research. Instead of spending weeks and months finding the information that we need, we can use computer software to sort through and get to the right data, at the right time, to the right people.
Five years ago, I created the Biotechnology Innovation program at Carnegie Mellon to apply information technology to enable biology and related fields to create valuable innovations that will help scientists to do their works faster and better. If we look back, we can see that information technology has led to significant changes across a wide variety of disciplines. Accounting, finance and manufacturing benefitted largely from software automation in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, advances in communication technologies helped to redefine how businesses managed their inventory, supply chains and how they relate with their customers. Many of these technologies and innovations have evolved from competitive differentiators to requisite competencies that are now essential to the operations of most companies.
Though many industries have embraced information technology as an enabler of increased information and improved efficiency, adoption of information technology in the biology is still relatively new. Since the early pioneering days of biotechnology in the 1970s, the number of promising discoveries and innovations has multiplied dramatically. Today there are over 200 therapies and vaccines that have been created through biotechnology and the industry as a whole has grown approximately 860% since 1994 to a global market cap of approximately $544 billion in 2014. Though innovations and potential breakthroughs in the industry are incredibly numerous, immature processes coupled with a long standing, biased inclination towards research over commercialization have prevented the available potential from being fully realized. For example, today drug development is very expensive. It costs hundred million dollars or more just to get a drug through clinical trials and approval. Among thousands of drugs being worked on, most only got partially way through then had to be abandoned. By applying information technology early in the process, it is possible to obtain better information and data to help scientist making informed decision and reduce waste.
Drug discovery and development is but one example where specific software innovations may be able to substantially streamline processes and productivity. By applying more advanced tools and methods, one can help close the innovation gap between research and commercialization activities in the biosciences. Successful development of such an innovation would create a disruptive inflection point in the industry that would soon regard it as a requisite necessity. If the evolution of the IT industry is any reasonable analogy, one can expect an explosive proliferation of software in the biology as emphasis shifts from research to product development.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
