Unravelling the code of life

Bioinformatics enthusiast Howard Asher (front) and Daniel Batten, founder and chief executive of the Auckland company Biomatters. Picture / Dean Purcell

New Zealand's culture will revolutionise medical practice within 10 years, says a visiting leader in the "bioinformatics" industry.

Bioinformatics is the science of using information technology to understand human DNA.

The unravelling of the human genome in 2000 has been described as laying out all the parts of a jumbo jet on the tarmac - without knowing how to put it together.

The chairman of the California-based not-for-profit Life Sciences Information Technology Global Institute, Howard Asher, said New Zealand was leading the way in finding the blueprint.

"For the last two centuries, we've managed human medicine based on a physician's knowledge of organs," he said.

Finding a means to understand the ever-growing mass of information created since 2000 would mark a "quantum leap" in health care.

"In a decade from today, you'll be asked to put a digital wafer in your mouth. It will beam up your genome type and then the physician will get it back on a tool like a cellphone."

Drugs will be prescribed based on an individual's genome type to maximise the benefit and minimise side-effects.

Asher said that would mark the conversion "of the art of medicine into the science of medicine".

The shift is already under way.

Asher said Auckland University professor Peter Hunter had created models of human organs, enabling examination of the effect of treatment at a cellular level.

One day that would be at a molecular level.

Similarly detailed work the world over was doubling the global life sciences data pool every six months, creating a serious problem - information overload.

The LSIT institute was created by Asher, with the backing of industry giants such as Pfizer, to develop trusted and reliable IT practices.

"The top 100 drug companies are doing the exact same thing with IT - 99 different ways," he said.

Existing systems of information control in businesses such as banking point the way for the life sciences.

"They wanted to build a mechanism that anywhere in the world you could do your banking and trust it would be safe and private - today we call it the ATM."

Asher, an advisory board member to Auckland bioinformatics company Biomatters, said New Zealand was poised to lead the world in life sciences IT.

New Zealand's tendency to be outward-looking, and the characteristics that go with that, pushed it ahead of more insular countries like the United States.

Key factors were having a small close-knit population, a well-educated workforce and a habit of collaboration.

"When I come here it's overwhelming - that spirit of collaboration, the spirit of partnering," Asher said.

This spirit was exemplified in Biomatters' collaboration with another New Zealand company, Reel Two, in a bid to develop the world's first bioinformatics operating system.

Biomatters chief executive Daniel Batten said the company was tackling three key research issues: how to gather, integrate and analyse data.

Collaborating with Reel Two's data mining tool, the equivalent of a bio-Google, Batten aims to integrate information from isolated research tools and ensure any biologist can access the data.

"You don't have to understand how the engine works in order to get in the car and drive it. That's how bioinformatics must be in the future," he said.

Asher's New Zealand visit is to identify other partners needed to create a world-standard bioinformatic operating system within three years.

"I believe that can be done here in New Zealand faster and better than any other country in the world," he said.

But he is not just trying to motivate industry and government partners.

"It's critical that the public demand better medicine in order to provide the funding that's necessary to do this paradigm shift. This is monumental to public health."

Information overload

* Human genome data is a mine of medical clues waiting to be tapped.

* The global life sciences data pool is doubling every six months.

* New Zealand's collaborative way of doing things provides an opportunity to be a bioinformatics leader.

* LSIT Global Institute is looking for local organisations with which to collaborate.