Iain Mattaj, director general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), believes there will be a rapid progress in life sciences "because basic biological research is exploding its capacity to generate data and information".
The explosion in the amount of data generated by the complexity of biological systems is such that "we will not be able to understand them fully by experimental methods," he said, highlighting the need for biomedical scientists to turn towards the ICT sector for help.
Examples of applications opened up may include knowledge about how genetic differences affect disease development, he said.
In order to understand how a cell, organ or whole organism works, "we have to be able to generate computational models of how biological systems work and then test experimentally whether the models are correct," he explained.
Much better European data resource infrastructures are also needed, as well as data collection, annotation, integration and distribution methods to handle and distribute the amounts of data produced, he underlined. Gene sequencing data, for example, is very different from that of a protein structure, and yet these very different types of data need to be put together, he said.
More financial support for the creation of data resources is needed in Europe, Mattaj continued. "It is critical that the information that we generate experimentally does not get lost, but is collected and distributed so that everybody can use everyone else's data." If information is to be shared, then "data standards have to be fixed" as well, and ways found to make clinical and medical information accessible to a large community of researchers, he added.
Mattaj says it would also be "extremely useful" if problems of security and anonymity could be solved. At the moment, each EU member state has its own laws on data privacy. In most countries, access to patients' genetic data or disease history is only granted to the doctor who is directly treating the patient.
Both the EU and the US are strong performers in biomedical informatics, said Mattaj. But the US is advantaged in that the basic biology community and the medical communities work more closely together, making information sharing easier. In Europe, the disciplinary gap is "difficult to bridge", Mattaj explained.
