Life Sciences
The list of states that claim to have a major life sciences initiative is long. The list of those that have something tangible to show as a result of their life sciences initiatives is much shorter – and includes the State of Indiana. The State's approach to the life sciences is intended to improve human health generally and the quality of life of Indiana residents especially. Each of the three institutions participating in Research in Indiana is taking part in these statewide efforts. The State’s initiatives for the life sciences involve pursuit of three strategies:
- Performing the new, basic research that will enable new medical therapies in the future
- Accelerating the applied research that brings new therapies into use
Improving the economy of Indiana and with it the quality of life of its residents
Indiana University
Indiana University is in the third year of the Indiana Genomics Initiative, a project established by a $105 million grant from the Lilly Endowment. This grant enables IU to perform the basic research required to create new medical treatments that take advantage of our growing understanding of the human genome, and information technology has been a critical part of that effort. Life scientists make heavy use of IU's two main high performance computing (HPC) systems: a 1 TFLOPS IBM SP and a 2.2 TFLOPS Linux cluster from IBM. IU has created a new system, called the Centralized Life Sciences Data Service, that enables researchers at the IU School of Medicine to seamlessly access public data stores and data obtained within the School's own research programs. New applications in visualization aid researchers studying human genetic diseases. And advanced supercomputing techniques are being employed in the development of better targeting techniques for radiation therapy against cancer. Perhaps the biggest statement that can be made about Indiana's use of advanced information technology is that M.D./Ph.D. researchers now consider IU's supercomputers, massive data storage systems, and advanced visualization facilities a critical part of their research, accelerating some discoveries and enabling others that would otherwise not be possible.
Purdue University
The Bindley Bioscience Center, located in Purdue’s Discovery Park, acts as a multi-discipline point of collaboration for the next generation of life science research. Purdue is restructuring its Life Sciences programs to leverage interrelationships between genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, bioinformatics, and other related fields. This new systemic view of Life Sciences eases the issues of gathering researchers to collaboratively attack new problems while explicitly advancing the relationships between the core sciences.
Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP) is linking Purdue’s major life science instruments to a central data store. The first step towards research is that e-notebooks will replace the classic laboratory notebook with an online system. E-notebooks will accommodate the vast amount of heterogeneous data generated by life sciences research, providing a secure environment, assure robust integrity, and allow search capabilities that put needed information at life scientists’ fingertips.
Purdue, in collaboration with IBM, Eli Lilly, and others, is also creating intelligent instruments to improve life sciences research. Life sciences instruments previously could not provide real-time feedback while operational. The new tools serve to make discovery faster and more robust while actually collecting less information, since the data collection cycle is done more intelligently. Throughout its life sciences programs, Purdue is changing the way that research is performed, in pursuit of a new era of data-centric life sciences discovery.
University of Notre Dame
Two years ago, the University of Notre Dame established an
Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Biocomplexity (ICSB), the study
of complex structures and behaviors arising from the interaction of biological
entities (molecules, cells, or organisms). Members of the ICSB, representing
eight departments in the colleges of science and engineering, combine
physical, mathematical, computational, and information technology approaches
with those of modern biology to understand biocomplexity in a quantitative
and predictive way.
The ICSB’s goal is to develop comprehensive multiscale models of cell and tissue organization and their relation to development. ICSB research projects address three scales of structure, starting from the level of genetic control networks, molecular machines, and cytoskeletal and protein networks. The cellular level emphasizes cell polarity and cell-cell interactions. Supercellular-level studies include the aggregation of cells into tissues and tissues into organs. All projects combine quantitative experiments and computer simulation and build on the complementary strengths of researchers at Notre Dame and collaborators from Indiana University.
Last year the ICSB—together with Indiana University’s Biocomplexity Institute and Pervasive Technology Laboratories and the College of Science and School of Medicine at IUPUI—created the Indiana Biocomplexity Consortium for supporting student exchange as well as the development of new educational initiatives and collaborative research projects. The consortium seeks national visibility by supporting short- and long-term visitors, conducting a distinguished speakers’ lecture series, and organizing workshops and biocomplexity seminars. In 2003 with support from the National Science Foundation, Whitaker Foundation, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, the consortium organized biocomplexity workshops on regenerative biology and medicine, held May 15-18 in Bloomington, and on multiscale modeling in biology, held August 14-17 at Notre Dame.