Biotech Industry Developing Worldwide Standard for Data

URL: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63010-2001May22.html

Date accessed: 4 June 2001

By Justin Gillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 23, 2001; Page E03

Worried that modern biology is producing a confused Babel of computer data, a coalition of biotechnology companies and organizations is planning to develop a worldwide standard for storing and retrieving information about the molecular details of life.

Biologists have been creating huge data archives in recent years in their hunt for the fundamental causes of disease. But the information is often stored in differing formats, making it hard to compare the data and tie together research from multiple laboratories.

The new coalition, led by the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), a Washington trade group, plans to spend the next year or so creating a detailed specification for biological data. This specification would be available without fee to any company or scientist that wanted to use it to help organize and mine information.

Nearly 35 companies and organizations have taken part in discussions regarding the project so far, and more, including foreign companies, are likely to join as details emerge. Among the leaders are the National Cancer Institute and two of the biggest information technology firms, International Business Machines Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.

In interviews, people at these organizations described an explosion of data emerging from the Human Genome Project and related private efforts, and they said a set of rules for managing the information is urgently needed.

"Once the human genome had been sequenced it was like the starting gun had been fired," said Jeff Augen, director of strategy for life sciences at IBM. "All of a sudden, this massive amount of data began pouring into these databases. What everybody realized is that the complexity of understanding the data, making use of the data -- that was really the challenge."

Standard-setting collaborations among competitors are common in the electronics and computer industries, but they were rare in biology until a couple of years ago. Companies overwhelmed by the accelerating pace of research began to mount joint scientific and computational projects, often with government researchers.

While opposition may emerge, there has been little so far. Morrie Ruffin, vice president of business development at BIO, cited a "groundswell of support" among scientists and biotechnology companies that know about the collaboration.

Some details of the project were released yesterday at a conference in California, and a formal announcement is planned at BIO's annual convention in San Diego in June. The project has been dubbed the Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium, or I3C.

Researchers trying to tap a wide variety of biological data sources confront massive headaches in tying them together, viewing them in a common format, or running them through computer programs to find hidden clues to the nature of disease. Sometimes custom software can be written to solve the problem, but that is slow, expensive and imperfect.

The plan BIO is devising would spell out the various types of biological data that databases can contain and specify rules for searching, manipulating and linking the data. These specifications would not supplant commercial software designed to aid molecular biologists but instead would consist of a set of rules that all such software would need to follow. Databases could be revised or filtered to make them comply with the rules.

The whole system would somewhat resemble the specifications that Microsoft Corp. and Apple Computer Inc. publish to allow thousands of other companies to write software for their operating systems. Commercial software claiming to comply with the I3C rules would probably be subjected to a certification process, winning an official seal of approval if it passed.

Ultimately, the plan is aimed at speeding the hunt for molecular causes of disease, and therefore the hunt for better treatments.

"We're all slowly getting older, and we all want to have better medical care," Augen said. "There's one ultimate goal that we all have -- personalized medicine, based on an accurate understanding at the molecular level of the genetics of the individual person."

Category: 58. General Biotechnology Information