LIFESCIENCE: Translating Extreme Geek Speak - i-biology

[ricardo dominguez <rdom@thing.net>]

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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 99
LIFESCIENCE
Linz, Austria, September 04 - 09
http://www.aec.at/lifescience
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Translating Extreme Geek Speak
                     by Kristen Philipkoski
http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/20395.html
                     3:00 a.m.  24.Jun.99.PDT
                     For medical researchers facing an
                     unprecedented glut of information, a new
                     approach aims to help them sift through
                     the mess.

                     "Science is generating data faster than
                     anybody can possibly figure out what to
                     do with it," said Mark Musen, associate
                     professor of medicine and computer
                     science at Stanford and head of Stanford
                     Medical Informatics. "Access is not a
                     problem as much as integrating and
                     interpreting."

                     Lion Bioscience AG, of Heidelberg,
                     Germany, has developed BioScout, a new
                     software platform that produces what it
                     calls i-biology.


                        Read ongoing Med-Tech coverage


                     Is it just a catchy buzzword? Bayer AG
                     doesn't think so. The German
                     pharmaceutical company on Thursday
                     announced a five-year, US$100 million
                     contract for Lion's i-biology services.

                     "Two technology revolutions will dominate
                     industrialized societies into the new
                     millennium: genomics and bioinformatics,"
                     said Friedrich von Bohlen, Lion's CEO.
                     "I-biology merges the second with the
                     third."

                     "Bioinformatics is mainly the use of
                     software from experts to experts.... You
                     need it, but for discovery and research
                     you need other software tools," Bohlen
                     said. BioScout is a much-needed solution
                     to the bottleneck.

                     The software integrates data from as
                     many different databases as a user
                     wants, then helps the scientists interpret
                     it. The software can also help companies
                     find databases relevant to the research.

                     Companies often have too many software
                     programs to use the data they need,
                     Bohlen said. "If we go into life-science
                     companies, we find up to 70 packages;
                     that means 70 kingdoms. When Europe
                     had 70 kingdoms, it was a very unhappy
                     time in history. Then democracy came up
                     and we integrated."

                     Lion's answer to life sciences democracy
                     is i-biology.

                     Musen said there are other platforms
                     aiming to do the same thing. For example,
                     Object-Protocol Model was developed by
                     researchers at Lawrence Berkeley
                     National Laboratory and BioKleisli came
                     out of the National University of
                     Singapore and the University of
                     Pennsylvania.

                     Neither of them have the corporate
                     financial backing and high-profile
                     exposure that Lion has achieved with its
                     deal with Bayer, however.

                     Bohlen said the i-biology platform will
                     come in handy for many companies,
                     possibly including Celera, a competitor in
                     the race to sequence the human genome.

                     "It's interesting that Celera recently
                     announced a partnership with Compaq.
                     Who will write the software? Celera has
                     the data, Compaq has the hardware.
                     Actually, that is a natural-born situation
                     for us," Bohlen said. "The intelligent part
                     is missing. Data management, that's
                     where intelligence comes from."

                     Ultimately, Bohlen said, the BioScout
                     platform will change the face of health
                     care.

                     "I believe we will move forward to more
                     individualized diagnosis and treatment. To
                     do that in an intelligent way, you need to
                     know how to get information from
                     phenotype and genotype correlations,
                     which can lead to certain predictions:
                     i.e., take this drug instead of another.
                     It's a natural step."

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