On February 28, 2008, Bloomberg.com reported that George Church, a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, plans to spend S1 billion to create a database to find new drugs by correlating each person’s personal health history to their DNA related information. Church, who’s PhD in 1984 led to the first direct genomic sequencing method and also helped initiate the Human Genome Project is backed by Google and OrbiMed Advisors LLC. Church plans to decode the DNA of 100,000 people in world’s biggest gene sequencing project.
The entire human genome has over 3 billion DNA base pairs. Humans have 24 unique chromosomes and an estimated 20,000 – 25, 000 unique genes. A gene is a portion of the genomic sequence that encodes proteins – building blocks of cells and tissues. Variations in genes and other parts of the DNA have been linked to various types of diseases. DNA chips or microarrays enable researchers to generate large amounts of DNA related data. Computational biology or bioinformatics is a very active area of research that deals with deriving intelligence from biological data.
Companies such as 23andme.com, navigenics.com, and decodeme.com provide consumers a service by which Single Neucleotide Polymorphisms (SNP) – tiny sequence variations – in their DNA is detected, with the promise that it can be used to calculate the levels of risks associated with various diseases. You can see a sample of results provided by 23andme here Above are just some of the examples of the growing trends in the life sciences area. Data is being generated at a fast pace within this field. Searching through large amounts of experimental data where you normalize the data, use the actual experimental values of the data along with any meta-text or annotations associated with the experiments to discover new relationships is data-based search. Such search engines typically also leverage an ontology and complex biological relationships to guide their searches.
One such company that I am associated with is NextBio, a vertical search engine for life sciences . At NextBio, we leverage all publically available life sciences related data, along with user-contributed data to provide a platform for life scientists to discover new relationships, perhaps between genes, diseases and treatments.
Going back to the original example of Church’s plan to decode DNA of 100,000 people I do hope that all that data will be publically available in the future for search engines, such as NextBio to use and help discover new drugs for diseases.
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