TIME : ביואינפורמטיקה

The Bioinformatics Gold Rush


A $300-million industry has emerged around
turning raw genome data into knowledge for making new drugs

By Ken Howard

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FURTHER READING:
Plastics." When a family friend whispered this word to Dustin Hoffman's character in the 1967 film The Graduate, he was advocating not just a novel career choice but an entirely different way of life. If that movie were made today, in the age of the deciphering of the human genome, the magic word might well be "bioinformatics."

Corporate and government-led scientists have already compiled the three gigabytes of paired A's, C's, T's and G's that spell out the human genetic code--a quantity of information that could fill more than 2,000 standard computer diskettes. But that is just the initial trickle of the flood of information to be tapped from the human genome. Researchers are generating gigantic databases containing the details of when and in which tissues of the body various genes are turned on, the shapes of the proteins the genes encode, how the proteins interact with one another and the role those interactions play in disease. Add to the mix the data pouring in about the genomes of so-called model organisms such as fruit flies and mice, and you have what Gene Myers, Jr., vice president of informatics research at Celera Genomics in Rockville, Md., calls "a tsunami of information." The new discipline of bioinformatics--a marriage between computer science and biology--seeks to make sense of it all. In so doing, it is destined to change the face of biomedicine.

"For the next two to three years, the amount of information will be phenomenal, and everyone will be overwhelmed by it," Myers predicts. "The race and competition will be who can mine it best. There will be such a wealth of riches."

A whole host of companies are vying for their share of the gold. Jason Reed of the investment banking firm Oscar Gruss & Son in New York City estimates that bioinformatics could be a $2-billion business within five years. He has compiled information on more than 50 private and publicly traded companies that offer bioinformatics products and services. These companies plug into the effort at various points: collecting and storing data, searching databases, and interpreting the data. Most sell access to their information to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies for a hefty subscription price that can run into the millions of dollars.




USING BIOINFORMATICS TO FIND DRUG TARGETS
The reason drug companies are so willing to line up and pay for such services--or to develop their own expensive resources in-house--is that bioinformatics offers the prospect of finding better drug targets earlier in the drug development process. This efficiency could trim the number of potential therapeutics moving through a company's clinical testing pipeline, significantly decreasing overall costs. It could also create extra profits for drug companies by whittling the time it takes to research and develop a drug, thus lengthening the time a drug is on the market before its patent expires.

"Assume I'm a pharmaceutical company and somebody can get [my] drug to the market one year sooner," explains Stelios Papadopoulos, managing director of health care at the New York investment banking firm SG Cowen. "It could mean you could grab maybe $500 million in sales you would not have recovered."

Before any financial windfalls can occur, however, bioinformatics companies must contend with the current plethora of genomic data while constantly refining their technology, research approaches and business models. They must also focus on the real challenge and opportunity--finding out how all the shards of information relate to one another and making sense of the big picture.

"Methods have evolved to the point that you can generate lots of information," comments Michael R. Fannon, vice president and chief information officer of Human Genome Sciences, also in Rockville. "But we don't know how important that information is."

Divining that importance is the job of bioinformatics. The field got its start in the early 1980s with a database called GenBank, which was originated by the U.S. Department of Energy to hold the short stretches of DNA sequence that scientists were just beginning to obtain from a range of organisms. In the early days of GenBank a roomful of technicians sat at keyboards consisting of only the four letters A, C, T and G, tediously entering the DNA-sequence information published in academic journals. As the years went on, new protocols enabled researchers to dial up GenBank and dump in their sequence data directly, and the administration of GenBank was transferred to the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). After the advent of the World Wide Web, researchers could access the data in GenBank for free from around the globe.

Once the Human Genome Project (