In five years, says Derek Taylor, understanding bioinformatics is going to be as important as being able to write a paragraph. Is that hyperbole? Absolutely. But it's hard to blame the UB professor for getting excited.
Between semesters this summer, UB opened the doors to its $200 million center for bioinformatics, the third piece of a medical hub that promises to put the university at the forefront of a revolution in bioscience. Since 2001, when a statewide initiative was launched, bioinformatics has been a little more than a buzzword to many around Buffalo, but with the center now up and running, it's poised to meet lofty expectations and maybe even exceed a few.
A unique setup
Miles from campus, tucked downtown amid abandoned buildings and low-income housing, UB's Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences isn't tall enough to stand out in Buffalo's skyline, but within its four stories of crisp white architecture, some of the world's preeminent researchers and scientists are working to cure Alzheimer's, solve strokes and neurological diseases, map population health genetics, patent nanomedicines and prevent cancer.
Helping them is a super-cluster computer ranked in the top 10 of academia. Able to do 13 trillion operations per second, it's the linchpin to bioinformatics, the ability to dissect and analyze mass amounts of genetic data that would take years on an average PC. Coupled with advances in the human genome, bioinformatics is on the crest of a scientific wave that signals the future is now.
The building itself is full of neat features - lighting triggered by motion sensors, cutting-edge conference rooms, entire lab spaces that adjust for righties or lefties. But what makes it unique, says Bruce Holm, the center's executive director, is its location and layout. The long, open laboratories are designed to allow chemists, biologists and pharmacists to all work together without traditional barriers. And because the center is connected to both the Roswell Park Cancer Institute and, eventually, the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, researchers and administrators have free-flow access to each other.
Having opened in June, the center still needs finishing touches, and as most of its 500 researchers have yet to move in, there's a before-the-storm quiet in its empty offices. Holm said once the heavy-duty research equipment is brought in, the staff will follow, with the center hitting full-stride between November and January.
Until then, the faculty - recruited both from UB and national searches - are continuing their work elsewhere. UB professor Jian Feng, whose focus is on Parkinson's disease, said he's eager to move his program from South Campus to downtown, where there's a benefit to being closer to patients.
"That has a physical impact on you," Feng said, "because on one hand you're just in a lab, but these experiments are meaningful because they will lead to cures."
The center's lab-to-bedside emphasis, said Holm, will ensure that researchers don't get lost in their test tubes.
"You need to have focus," he said. "But the focus can lead to having blinders on."
Holm adds he doesn't mean that as a slight to his staff
"You can get caught on step three just because there's no one to champion step four," he said. "That's our job, to champion all the steps."
Turning to undergrads
But there is another step that could use more attention.
"There's infrastructure here," said Taylor, the biology professor who teaches UB's lone undergraduate course in bioinformatics. "Now we need more people."
With such a flurry of activity at the highest levels in this biotech revolution, the same excitement has yet to reach the lowest levels, where, as Holm said, it starts with undergraduates. Although the downtown center is integral to UB's future prominence, prestige and academic value, few students have even heard of bioinformatics.
Along with Taylor's class, which he says is limited by space and resources, there is a B.S. offered in the field. But as of last fall, only three total students were in that program, according to the Office of Institutional Analysis.
On the graduate level, some 200 students will be on the center's research teams. Undergrads, however, have as many options as Buffalo high school students, who at East High School can choose a concentration in bioinformatics for the first time this year.
UB has offered its one class since 2000, but Taylor says bioinformatics' possibilities are too important to not reach out to more people. A medical turning point is coming, he says, in which people will affordably be able to map their individual genomes, allowing for personalized medicine that requires everyone, not just researchers, to be informed.
"It will go there in the future," Taylor said. "There's no doubt about it."
It's not that undergraduates are being ignored. Holm said the center won't be doing its job if its staff separates what it does downtown from the teaching it does on campus. The problem, rather, is that the carriage couldn't come before the horse. Now that the center is open, things should be different, said Michael Ryan, dean of undergraduate studies.
Ryan points to the new Center for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities as one way to get students into bioinformatics, adding that existing programs, classes and degrees, not new ones, will be used to expand involvement.
Holm said he is "constantly amazed" by what young people are doing in bioinformatics, and there needs to be more of them.
"Its time we evolve our educational programs to the next level," he said. "We've gotten a decent start to it at UB. It's time to take those training programs up a notch."
Commercialization
Excuse Bruce Holm if he sounds tired when talking about all this. The reserved, boyish administrator is on the job theses days before the sun rises until after it sets. And if he does his job well, it will mean more than just advances in medicine. Many are looking to bioinformatics to also cure Buffalo's economic ills.
So far, the center has created or retained 4,000 jobs and spun off 29 biotech-related companies since 2001, said Marnie Lavigne, director of business development.
The potential is big, as the center goes after markets worth billions of dollars. "But it's difficult for people to understand this isn't a silver bullet," Lavigne said. "High-tech economies take several decades to grow."
"It is tough," she added, "because people become frustrated and feel that things aren't progressing."
That said, Lavigne thinks Buffalo has rallied around the center better than cities with similar initiatives in Albany and Syracuse. And in the same way that UB bringing together scientists across the spectrum, it's also setting a trend in connecting them with businesspeople just an elevator ride from the labs.
"You have to bring in the reality-check people who will say, 'Yes, that's very important, but by itself that's not good enough,' " said Holm. Curing a disease can't happen if there isn't a company willing to commercialize it.
And in the past, where big-ticket sellers like Nicorette gum and the pacemaker have been invented in Buffalo but the production dollars went elsewhere, the center is built to create a start-to-finish already found at other universities.
"It is the intent of the (center) to allow us to do that catch-up," said Michael Quinn, the center's deputy director. "We have a great history in science, but we want it to be better developed and stay here."
To that end, the center seems to have Buffalo's history working against it. And it doesn't help that with so much happening at once, neither Western New Yorkers nor the UB community really grasp what the bioinformatics center is all about.
"It behooves us to communicate more," Lavigne said. "But people actually get pretty excited pretty quickly, and now that the buildings are open, we will continue to beat that drum."
