Research Seminar - October 23, 2003

A Quick Tour of IBM Solutions, Research, and Collaborations in the Life Sciences

Abstract:

IBM Life Science Solutions business unit was established in September 2000 to provide the IT infrastructure that researchers in biotechnology, pharmaceutical research, genomics, proteomics, and healthcare need to turn data into scientific discovery and new treatments for disease. IBM provides the components from hardware infrastructure up to middleware integration. We rely upon partnerships and alliances to provide specific applications and data which are supported by IBM research and services to provide a fully integrated solution for our customers.

IBM Research is the largest corporate research organisation in the world and has funded the Computational Biology Centre at our TJ Watson Research laboratories in upstate New York since 1992. Their research areas include: Bioinformatics Algorithms, Medical Informatics, Structural Biology, Protein Dynamics, Data Management and Integration, Functional Genomics and Systems Biology. The group has a large number of collaborations with researchers around the globe and operates to a large extent as an academic institute by publishing extensively in the scientific literature and providing their research algorithms to the scientific community. Two of our major discovery tools freely available to the scientific community are Tieresias a research based pattern discovery tool used to find patterns in any digital data streams and Genes@Work a standalone GUI application that analyses gene expression data by clustering using a novel metric. Teiresias applications include pattern discovery in DNA/protein sequences, multiple sequence alignment, text mining, association discovery, gene expression analysis, any problem you can rewrite as multiple streams of numbers, similarity searching, protein annotation, and gene finding.

IBM is also actively involved in a number of collaborative projects in information based medicine. Information based medicine is a system of medical care which supplements traditional opinion-based diagnoses with new insights gleaned through computerized data acquisition, management and analysis. It will revolutionise healthcare systems through the integration of individual data into patient records that contain both traditional data types and newer diagnostics such as geneotype information and digital medical images. It will drive the development of new therapies by discovering the mechanisms of disease causation and enhancing the clinical trials process.

A brief biography
Bruce Ross is the IBM Life Sciences Specialist for Australia and New Zealand. His role is to advise and assist the ANZ Life Science community to help them leverage IT solutions to solve biological problems. He has a PhD in Molecular Biology from Melbourne University and a post-graduate degree in Software Engineering from RMIT. After completing his PhD he spent 8 years in academic research followed by 7 years in pharmaceutical R&D at CSL in Melbourne. Bruce has over 40 research publications in Molecular Biology and 2 patents. He joined IBM in February of this year.