Computational Biology & Medical Informatics

The Computational Biology and Medical Informatics Professional Interest Community embraces activities at IBM Research worldwide. It includes the Computational Biology Center at the T. J. Watson Research Center, with strong affiliations with Almaden and other IBM Research Centers. Computational Biology (CompBio), including Bioinformatics, is the study of how computer systems can manage, analyze, and simulate the complex structures and processes inherent in living systems.

Naturally this emergence is of critical importance due to the huge volume of data flooding in from biology including the genome projects, proteomics, protein structure determination and the rapid expansion in digitalization of patient biomedical data. CompBio is inherently a multi-disciplinary field with important applications in medicine, agriculture, chemistry and ultimately nanotechnology. Medical Informatics includes knowledge discovery and mining of clinical data, and clinical genomic data, together with the integration and presentation of that information in useful ways applied to patients in a clinical setting. Although these are most commonly viewed as a hybrid of biology, medicine, and computer science, and draws upon work in pattern recognition, simulation science, databases, knowledge discovery, data mining, and statistics and information theory, it has a flavor of its own much as biochemistry acquired its own character after arising from the overlap of biology and chemistry.

Computational Biology and Medical Informatics research at IBM spans pattern recognition in sequences, structures and processes, the studying of systems ranging from single protein molecules through to complex molecular interactions, and the data analysis, interpretation and reverse-engineering of complex disease-lifestyle-genomic interactions for fuller biological understanding. These include the IBM protein science initiative and hence link strongly to the Blue Gene petaflop computing initiative. There is a very strong working interaction with IBM Health Care and Life Sciences, and an ongoing study of how the algorithms developed at IBM can be used to analyze the content of patient records, so enabling the path to a rational, computer-and-genomics-based personalized medicine.