The genome connection

Processing biomedical data requires vast collaboration, as Irish scientists are discovering, writes Dick Ahlstrom

Time is money, but so too is information. And better access to the vast ocean of information coming from studies of the human genome can also deliver medical and pharmaceutical benefits for the patient.

How to handle the already huge and growing human biological information resource is central to the work of the new Institute of Biomedical Informatics (IBI).

Announced earlier this month, the all-Ireland collaboration involves several universities, computer company Hewlett-Packard and the Irish Government. The goal is to conduct research into biomedical informatics and develop products needed by this specialised area of science.

The partnership, which includes University College Dublin, NUI Galway, Trinity College Dublin and Queen's University Belfast, is expected to attract funding worth €30 million over the next five years, says UCD's vice-president for research and professor of molecular medicine, Prof Des Fitzgerald.

"The funding will be spent on two things. The creation of a fourth-level programme between the institutions both at masters and PhD level. There will also be funding in support of research programmes," he says.

The IBI already has a home within UCD's existing research centre, the Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory (CASL), which has a staff of about 200 researchers.

All of the partner institutions will be involved in the research activity, however, and will share space and facilities available at the CASL, he adds.

CASL IS ALREADY highly interdisciplinary, with specialists in bioinformatics, engineers, computer scientists and even financial modellers. "The idea was to bring people with a variety of backgrounds together," says Prof Fitzgerald. "One of the things that drove us was the research issue."

This also holds true for the IBI partnership. Each partner institution is working on various aspects of biomedical informatics. For example Trinity's Jane Grimson is developing health information systems for patient records, while Galway's Frank Barry and Tim O'Brien need information systems that can support their studies into adult stem cells and how they differentiate.

"It is being able to use these tools to interrogate all types of biological data," says Prof Fitzgerald.

Hewlett-Packard's connection came via an existing agreement it had with another UCD Conway Institute researcher, Des Higgins. The company wanted to expand the activity.

"They approached me about what could be done between HP and the Conway. I wanted to take the idea further, to speak to the biological sciences in general."

This eventually led to the much larger collaboration that brought in the other universities and the Irish Government. The IBI's work is already underway, states Hewlett-Packard's lead technologist involved in the IBI project, Eamonn O'Toole, who is also the company's Galway-based chief technologist in health and life sciences.

"The money is in place for 12 students funded by HP and by Ircset [the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology]. Five are already in place in Galway, TCD and UCD and seven more awards will be offered this year," he says. "They are working on topics related to what the IBI is all about."

Hewlett-Packard readily agreed to support the project, O'Toole says. "There is a long history of HP being involved in life sciences research." This stretches back into the earliest days of the international effort to detail the human genome.

"In practice it means you have biologists working with computer scientists and you have clinical scientists getting into the mixture. There is a lot of interest in supplying the information that came out of the genome to improve human health."

The IBI will also help Hewlett-Packard develop new technologies relevant to the scientific community involved in "data mining", says O'Toole.

"It will allow HP to develop new technologies. That is the ultimate objective, but in order to understand what the scientists needed we had to be involved in IBI." He also expects other companies to join the IBI consortium with a view to developing new products, something that could benefit the wider Irish software industry.