  
Putting Data to Work
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Stuart Garfield Photo
Ardais Corp.
has created a data library that contains more than 9,000 patient
cases with a variety of medical information. Shared among
researchers, this data, according to Martin Ferguson, founder and
chief scientific officer, enables clinicians to start identifying
diseases. |
The science of data
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| 05/27/2003 07:47 AM |
| By Dyke
Hendrickson |
When the automobile was introduced a
century ago, many observers saw its value but were unable to predict
just how significant it would be.
As the new millennium
dawns, the technology of bioinformatics has emerged as a powerful
force in the expanding field of data use.
But just how the
life sciences industry will be putting its data to work has not been
finalized. The only given is that bioinformatics will eventually
emerge as a dominant force in the search for answers in drug
discovery and disease diagnosis.
“Bioinformatics is going to
be around forever,” said Richard Kivel, chief executive of
MolecularWare, a Cambridge company that provides number-crunching
services for life sciences companies.
“There’s a tremendous
amount of data, and companies want to become faster and more
efficient in coming up with answers. (Bioinformatics) has great
potential, but the field is still developing.”
Industry
analysts say that the discovery of genome sequencing and other
research advances are providing an unprecedented amount of
data.
Some pharmaceutical companies have developed their own
bioinformatics solutions to make use of it.
And major
computer companies such as IBM and Compaq have developed solutions
that they say will help the pharmas and biotech firms crunch as many
numbers as they’ll ever want.
Because the cost of bringing a
drug to market is an estimated $897 million, the need to move
quickly is increasingly apparent.
One hesitates to start
screaming “Get a horse” to companies that haven’t yet discovered
bioinformatics products, but it’s clear that many companies are
unsettled as they proceed in their efforts to find effective
solutions to life sciences questions.
At a recent conference
of executives from biotech and software companies, biotech leaders
argued that software engineers have been unable to develop a fully
effective solution because these engineers don’t understand the life
sciences well enough.
Still, there are companies in New
England that are exploiting advances made in the field of putting
data to work.
Netezza Corp.,
based in Framingham, has developed a database appliance that
officials say delivers 10 to 20 times the performance for half the
cost of traditional systems.
It is designed to manage fast
data loads, and “optimize ad hoc and complex business intelligence
queries for maximum performance.”
Bill Blake is senior vice
president of product development at Netezza. When he was at Compaq Corp., he led a
team that was instrumental in providing the computing systems to the
Human Genome Project with supercomputers installed at Celera
Genomics, Sanger Institute at Cambridge in the United Kingdom and
the Whitehead Institute at MIT.
Blake said that effective use
of data someday may improve “designer drug” cancer treatments in
which a patient’s particular cancer can be matched against a
database of drug candidates.
“The hope is that the industry
can drive down the cost of a (personal) drug from a very high figure
now to something like $2,000 by 2006,” said Blake, a former top
executive at Compaq.
“We’re just at the beginning of an
exciting period of research.”
Blake added that powerful
computing applications have been successful in revenue assurance —
or providing billing services for wireless companies that generate
thousands of individual bills per day, often through splitting a
given call with other carriers.
Another company melding
computers with life sciences is Ardais Corp., based in
Lexington.
Ardais has created the Biomaterials and
Information for Genomic Research (BIGR) system as a human
disease-based discovery platform that can be applied to all phases
of drug discovery and development.
Ardais provides access to
BIGR to qualified academic and industrial researchers worldwide,
including medical research centers at the Harvard teaching
hospitals, Duke University, Maine Medical Center and the University
of Chicago.
The Ardais BIGR Library is a centralized, shared
clinical genomics repository encompassing tissue samples, molecular
derivatives and associated clinical information accessed by an array
of bioinformatics tools.
The library comprises more than 9,000
patient cases representing a broad diversity of diseases at various
stages, yielding more than 150,000 research-quality clinical
materials and associated clinical information.
The amount of
data is immense, and high-performance computers have been designed
to help clinicians identify and deal with disease.
“We are
able to identify relevant concepts in medical records,” said Martin
Ferguson, co-founder and chief scientific officer at Ardais. “If we
are looking at prostate cancer samples, for instance, the clinical
data (between several examples) has to be comparable.”
With
the companies’ large databases, researchers can cross-reference
properties of similar cancer characteristics and be closer to
prescribing an appropriate treatment.
And it will become
increasingly valuable, due to the continually expanding compendium
of clinical data, including patient outcome information that accrues
over time.
Another company involved in the use of data is
Spotfire Inc. of Somerville.
It provides its Guided Analytic
applications and services that empower extended enterprises and
their end users to make faster, more effective decisions using
private and public databases.
Company officials say that more
than 500 corporations and 20,000 users work with Spotfire products
worldwide, including the bioinformatics industry.
“Many
corporations are unwilling to purchase big new systems,” said David
Butler, vice president of strategy and business development. “They
want to make use of the data they already have.
“We’re a
software company, but we have an adviser role as well. We help
companies look at their data and configure an
application.
“Using data for decision-making is a strong
field. It’s one of the only (tech) areas that is growing now.”
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