CLEVELAND — Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM (Armonk, New York), wowed attendees Tuesday at the Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit when he argued that the time has come for a smarter healthcare system (Medical Device Daily, Oct. 7, 2009).
During his speech, Palmisano also hinted that IBM Research has developed the capability to create a nano-scale device that can act as a kind of "bar code reader" for an individual strand of DNA. He said the goal for this type of technology is to make personalized genetic makeup readily available to each individual for less than $1,000. "As you may recall, the first sequencing done by the Human Genome Project cost $3 billion," Palmisano said.
Soon after the session ended, IBM's Dan Pelino sat down with Medical Device Daily to further explain this development.
Pelino, general manager of IBM's healthcare and life sciences business, characterized the very fact that personalized genetic makeup could be made available for under $1,000 as "very positive."
According to the National Institutes of Health, the Human Genome Project (HGP) was one of the great feats of exploration in history. The HGP was an internal research effort to sequence and map all of the genes – together known as the genome – of members of our species, Homo sapiens. Completed in April 2003, the HGP gave us the ability to, for the first time, read nature's complete genetic blueprint for building a human being, the NIH said.
IBM said its scientists are drilling nano-sized holes into computer chips and passing DNA strands through them one "base" at a time in order to read the genetic code contained within their biological structures. The company said this research effort to design a silicon-based "DNA Transistor" could help pave the way to "easily and quickly read human DNA, generating advancements in health condition diagnosis and treatment."
"IBM has been able to take our expertise in microelectronics and combine that with physics and biology so that off of a single strand you could determine a person's genetic makeup," Pelino said.
When asked what kind of development timeline the company is looking at for this technology, Pelino said it is "always difficult to predict rate and pace," but that the "NIH has been encouraging this race to get to less than $1,000" for a genome project. He noted that about 17 other companies have also announced intentions to pursue a genome project and he believes that "a healthy competition between their ability to deliver genomic sequencing is good," Pelino said.
IBM says that having access to an individual's personal genetic code could advance personalized medicine by using genomic and molecular data to help facilitate the discovery and clinical testing of new products, and help determine a person's predisposition to a particular disease or condition.
According to the company, a team of IBM scientists from three fields – microelectronics, physics, and biology – are converging to master the technique that threads a long DNA molecule through a three nanometer wide hole, known as a nanopore, in a silicon microchip. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, or about 80,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, IBM noted. As the molecule is passed through the nanopore, it is ratcheted one unit of DNA at a time, as an electrical sensor "reads" the DNA. The information gathered from the reader could be used to gain a better understanding of an individual's medical makeup to help further the pursuit of personalized medicine, according to the company.
Pelino said the device could work by using either a blood or saliva sample.
"The challenge is slowing down the process to be able to read those [DNA strands]," Pelino said. "We could do an entire DNA substructure in a couple of hours ... the challenge is to slow it down to give you the confidence to look at pattern recognition."
IBM Research is working to optimize a process for controlling the rate at which a DNA strand moves through a nano-scale aperture on a thin membrane during analysis for DNA sequencing, the company said. While scientists around the world have been working on using nanopore technology to read DNA, IBM says that nobody has been able to figure out how to control the speed of a DNA strand as it travels through the nanopore, and slowing the speed is critical to being able to read the DNA strand.
IBM scientists believe they have a unique approach that could tackle this challenge. To control the speed at which the DNA flows through the microprocessor nanopore, IBM researchers have developed a device consisting of a multilayer metal/dielectric nano-structure that contains a nanopore, the company said. Voltage biases between the electrically addressable metal layers will modulate the electric field inside the nanopore. This device utilizes the interaction of discrete charges along the backbone of a DNA molecule with the modulated electric field to trap DNA in the nanopore. By cyclically turning on and off these gate voltages, the scientists showed theoretically and computationally – and expect to be able to prove experimentally – the plausibility of moving DNA through the nanopore at a rate of one nucleotide per cycle, a rate the scientists believe would make DNA readable, IBM said.
"The technologies that make reading DNA fast, cheap and widely available have the potential to revolutionize bio-medical research and herald an era of personalized medicine," Gustavo Stolovitzky, an IBM Research scientist, said in a company statement. "Ultimately, it could improve the quality of medical care by identifying patients who will gain the greatest benefit from a particular medicine and those who are most at risk of adverse reaction."
Amanda Pedersen; 229-471-4212