Nervous about narrowing product pipelines and costly clinical trial failures, big pharmaceutical companies are seeking new tools to revitalize their business. Amid the uncertainty, Rutgers University biologist Joseph Martin is making a rather grandiose-sounding proposition: He might be able to help.
It's not a totally idle claim, though. He's involved in a project backed by $50 million from the state of New Jersey, focused on producing a cutting-edge breed of scientists who are expert in computational and systems biology. "We hope we can find some real theories of biological systems, some very basic-science kinds of ideas," then "translate them to the bedside," Martin says. Companies have shown growing interest in such research, which could alleviate their woes in several ways. It promises to harness computers to predict drug effects (a few early successes have been reported) as well as identify promising compounds and help usher in a much-heralded era of medicine tailored to individual genomes.
The project includes an institute planned at the Rutger's Camden, NJ, campus, where Martin chairs the biology department. Part of the institute exists already, though without its own building in the Rutgers-Camden Center for Computational and Integrative Biology (launched in July 2007). Martin is acting director of the institute. The center is to eventually house 25 to 30 Rutgers faculty and about 40 to 60 masters and doctoral students, most working in math, computer science, and biology, Martin says. It will offer doctorates in integrative and computational biology, a relatively new interdisciplinary area.
This is merely Rutgers' "contribution to the larger institute," Martin says. Called the Integrative Biology and Genomic Medicine Institute, it's planned as a collaboration of four entities in the city: Rutgers-Camden; the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Camden; the Coriell Institute for Medical Research; and the newly formed Cancer Institute of New Jersey at Cooper University Hospital.
The combined institute, Martin adds, will foster joint projects and synergies among these four institutions; each will have an outpost in the planned 80,000-sq. ft. building, funded by the $50 million state allocation. Rutgers manages the funds for the construction, estimated to be finished in two years. It's "part of what we hope will be a huge revitalization of Camden," he says.
The institute will create an estimated 60 to 110 jobs, ranging from professors, graduate assistants, and lab technicians to secretarial and custodial staff, says Martin. Another aspect of the revitalization: Proponents of the institute predict it will keep new talent in the Camden community. The institute will advance integrative biology, a field that feeds on computational biology and involves analyzing many interacting variables to seek a big-picture understanding of organisms.
If one were to apply integrative biology to diabetes, for example, "the current approach is treatment with insulin," Martin notes. "But if you looked at the overall genome, you might be able to use a more sophisticated approach," with additional interventions. This could involve analyzing individual genomes, thus overlapping with the also-hot field of personalized medicine. That will be the Coriell Institute's focus at the institute, Martin says, musing: "Imagine each person getting their own little keychain with a copy of their genome."