Charles L Cooney is professor of chemical engineering and biochemical engineering in the Department of Chemical ENgineering, co-director of the programme on the pharmaceutical industry and associate director for industrial activities at the Biotechnology Processing Engineering Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Ma.

Prof Cooney serves as consultant to and is director of a number of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and is on the boards of several professional journals. indiamarkets spoke to Prof Cooney who is spoke on "Leveraging Advances in Information Technology for Application in Life Sciences" at the ongoing International Symposium on Bioinformatics and Genomics (January 14-17) in Bangalore.

indiamarkets: Why is the International Symposium on Bioinformatics and Genomics being held?
Prof Cooney: The meet is important for two reasons. One, because of the significance of genomics and bioinformatics, which are very important new areas - especially genomics, which is the foundation of modern drug discovery. This meet can help us get useful genomic information, which is very difficult.

Bioinformatics is important because it allows us to find ‘patterns’ – it helps us find the basis of diseases and to find targets for which drugs are then discovered. Bioinformatics is a tool to drug discovery.

The second reason that such a meet is important is that we can examine the nexus between biotechnology, information management and biological research. There are certain skills, human resources capabilities, which this field needs, which are all available in Bangalore. This can help in mining information on the human genome.

Thirdly, this field gets people from different areas – biotechnology, mathematics, engineering and IT.

indiamarkets: Please tell us more about bioinformatics.
Prof Cooney: Bioinformatics today is at an early stage.  No new drugs have been discovered with bioinformatics but neither has there been any failure either. Bioinformatics has been around for a long time - it is just that it became important and became needed much more after the discovery of the human genome code. We now have so much more information – a whole lot of “noisy information” – it is important to be able to find out the new and useful information about it. It is like trying to find the one blade of grass that is a shade different from the others.

indiamarkets: Which countries are interested in bioinformatics and genomics?
Prof Cooney: Western Europe, US and India are interested in bioinformatics. Singapore is also interested because of the strong IT skills it possesses. It sees opportunities in bioinformatics. In fact, all countries with biological research programmes and an active pharmaceutical industry will be interested in bioinformatics and genomics. ALso, all major pharmaceutical companies will be interested in bioinformatics and genomic programmes.

indiamarkets: Is there any problem that this emerging sector faces?
Prof Cooney: One problem in bioinformatics is the lack of skilled, trained people. Therefore, India is a country with good potential, where Indians can take advantage of the strong IT infrastructure as well as of people involved in biological research. India can leverage the same resources that are needed for IT in this field. Manpower is critical to the field, in both USA and India.

The challenge is to take people from Information Technology and biological sciences and bring them together. The problem is with the academics because they follow their narrow disciplines – it is important to get people together to support research.

indiamarkets: Why are there no new drugs from this sector?
Prof Cooney: This is because of the time it takes for a drug to be commercialised, which is about ten years, even in the best cases. Genomics itself is a few years old and that is another reason why there have been no new drugs. But many companies are using biotechnology to find new drugs.

indiamarkets: Will these new drugs be cheaper?
Prof Cooney: No, these drugs will not be cheaper. The costs of drugs depend on utility. Drugs are not like commodities. It is expensive to develop them. Just because it takes less time to develop them does not mean that they will be inexpensive. But they will be better drugs and will make healthcare more effective.  Also, the cost of the drug is a small part of the total cost of healthcare.