Innovation - New Life Sciences Collaboratory from IBM

I have been a fan of the collaboratory model since I first learned of it. However I wasn't able to really share a life sciences example. Until this week. IBM, the University of Melbourne and the Victorian government today announced a new IBM Research Collaboratory for Life Sciences, located in Melbourne, Australia. The collaboratory is IBM’s first life sciences collaboratory, and IBM’s first collaboratory in the southern hemisphere. It will use high-performance computing – including IBM’s BlueGene super computer – to advance biological sciences and medical research.

Collaboratory Goals
The collaboration is dedicated to dramatic improvements in human health through technology innovation in medical diagnostics, drug discovery and drug design, underpinned by a deep understanding of disease. The collaboratory will use data and high-performance computing to model biological systems in order to accelerate research and treatments for conditions such as cancer and neurological disease.

Scientists from VLSCI and IBM Research will work to accelerate the translation of our fundamental understanding of biology to improvements in medical care and health outcomes, with projects such as:

• Medical Imaging and Neuroscience: high performance computers are used to analyse images from the devices such as MRI, PET and the synchrotron.
• Clinical Genomics: the identification of combinations of genes implicated in disease and the ability to predict susceptibility to disease and treatment outcome from an individual’s genome and medical history.
• Structural Biology: understanding the structure and shape of biological macromolecules, fundamental to pharmaceutical discovery.
• Integrated Systems Biology: understanding and modelling the dynamic behaviour of complex systems, from genes, proteins, cells, tissues and organs to organisms.

What is the bottom line?

By bringing computation to medical research, breakthroughs in diagnosis and treatment can be achieved much quicker. What may have taken two years or more using traditional computational and wet laboratory techniques can be achieved in a matter of days or weeks.

See more on this youtube video....