Designing life on your desktop

>> The brave and profitable new world of bioinformatics comes to McGill

by JOHN EDMONDS

The marriage of information technology (IT) and biotech has produced a child with a geeky name--bioinformatics. And though the egghead infant is only just learning how to walk, it promises to be a revolutionary.

Bioinformatics means using computers to decipher and manipulate information about proteins, DNA and other complex molecules essential to life. According to the world's leading biotech players, the field will result in a major enhancement of our ability to diagnose and treat disease. And with almost half of Canada's biopharmaceutical research industry in Montreal, and the creation this coming year of McGill University's new Bioinformatics Centre, our town will have a major piece of the action.

"Currently most drugs are tested in the lab--in vitro. This takes a long time. But with bioinformatics, much of the testing can be done by computer modeling--in silico. And this will really cut down on testing time," says Mike Hallett, a bioinformatics expert who will be at the core of McGill's new facility.

Not only will drug testing be faster, but entirely new molecules can be designed. "We can see what protein we might need for a drug, and actually design it, based on an existing protein," Hallett says.

Hallett says your typical desktop PC is powerful enough for drug design, if programmed properly. Creating such programs will be an important project at McGill's new centre. And he says this work will be a boon to Montreal's numerous small biotech startup companies--as well as for those who benefit from the new medications.

Past and future

But there's much more to bioinformatics than simply drugs. According to Martin Godbout, CEO of Genome Canada--a federally funded not-for-profit corporation which coordinates genome research in Canada--the field may tell us about our personal futures and collective past.

"If you could look at my DNA and see that I had a predisposition to hypertension, you could tell me to take it easy, avoid certain foods, or start taking a drug," says Godbout. "I might live longer." Genetic tests already exist for some diseases, such as breast cancer, based on our familiarity with only a tiny fraction of human DNA. But when we have analyzed the whole genome--the set of all DNA instructions for a species--our knowledge of potential future health problems will be radically altered, says Godbout.

Similarly, he says, much of the biological past may be coded in our DNA. "By understanding the human genome we can make real progress in understanding how we evolved as a species, and the whole evolution of life," Godbout says. And given the huge amount of data in our DNA--three-billion "base pairs," the smallest genetic units--the task of understanding our genes would be inconceivable without modern computer technology.

Computing life

In fact, bioinformatics developed as a serious field largely as a result of the Human Genome Project--the effort by a global consortium of private, academic and governmental institutions to decode nature's recipe for how to make a person.

"You hear that they've decoded the human genome," says Godbout. "But that's still a few years away. But even then, we will just have all the words in the genetic dictionary. We won't know what they mean. When we have listed all the words and their functions in their proper order, then we can start to understand sentences. People will be working on that for a long time. And then there's the genomes of other species."

But benefits should arrive before computers have crunched through the planet's vast accumulation of DNA information. Godbout says research teams in different cities, sharing their findings on the Internet, will focus on relevant regions of DNA that might be linked to a given negative or positive characteristic--learning the alphabet one letter at a time.

"Genome Canada got a $160-million grant from the federal government in February," says Godbout. "And provincial governments will also be investing millions in genome research."

Godbout describes the creation this coming year of five regional genomic centres in Canada--one for each region.

"Quebec will be making a major announcement around August 15. I'm not allowed to tell you what it is right now," he says. "But it has to do with Quebec's focus in genomics, which will be in our local area of expertise--obviously we won't be studying salmon. But we're very strong in medical research. When we announce the focus of Quebec's genome centre, we will want the world to know that whatever it is we choose, we intend to lead the world in that field."

Ethical concerns

Could there be a downside to bioinformatics? According to professional trendspotter Jeremy Rifkin, author of numerous books, including The End of Work and The Biotech Century, the pharmaceutical vision of bioinformatics is a limited one.

"Instead of using computers to design drugs, bioinformatics should be used to determine remedies found in nature," Rifkin told the Mirror. "Imagine if you could identify a remedy for cancer in a plant which is tailor-made to fighting the disease in your own body."

Rifkin also decries the fact that much of the potentially valuable DNA of other organisms is being eradicated through species extinction due to human activity. And he warns that genomic advances--accelerated with computer technology--could lead to eugenics, the attempt to better the human "breed."

Will bioinformatics help scientists edit or rewrite the codebook of life? "We do not think that bioinformatics will have any big impact on genetic engineering in the near future," says Godbout. "But it will speed things up, for sure."

For many who work in the field, like Mike Hallett, McGill's new bioinformatics star, the ethics of the technology is for society as a whole to judge. "What we do with bioinformatics is get the information. What we do with it then has yet to be decided," says Hallett.

Some of those decisions will be anything but easy. Says Denis Thérien, chair of McGill's computer science department and early spearhead for the creation of the new centre, "Biotechnology is going to stir things up. We haven't yet had a debate. Or you could say that the debates we have had so far have been just a warm-up to the debates we are going to have. You think there's been much of a debate over designer tomatoes? What about designer babies?" :

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