BBI

Imaging, mathematics and biology will be brought together in a new National Institutes of Health (NIH; Bethesda, Maryland) Center of Excellence, unveiled recently, to explore the ways that these sciences can be combined, with the resultant research insights shared with the rest of the scientific world. The "machinery of life" must be looked at, says Eric Jakobsson, PhD, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), which is funding the Center for Quantitative Biology at Princeton University (Princeton, New Jersey), the NIH's fifth center of excellence.

Advanced forms of imaging, computational informatics, biochip systems and other high-tech technologies will be featured systems used by the new center, plans for which were unveiled last month. NIGMS funding support for the center will be $3 million the first year, with expected estimated support ranging to $14.8 million over five years.

In general, the center's mission is "to probe the complexities of living systems," according to NIGMS. But Jakobsson expresses the even broader hope that the results of the center's efforts could create the excitement for biological research among students analogous to the jump-start given to U.S. science education by the Russian launch of Sputnik in the late-1950s. "Although we haven't quite realized it yet," he told The BBI Newsletter, "I think there is a Sputnik out there – and I think it is bioterrorism and infectious diseases."

Identifying and battling these threats may be just one of the outcomes he sees for the center, noting that such threats can be launched by relatively poor nations and small terror groups. And, he adds, "The offense has such an enormous advantage." But the scientific "soldiers" who might do battle in these cases aren't being developed, he notes. "The youngsters in this country who are opting for research training and careers in biomedical research are very few, far less than we need."

A key aspect of the new center's work will be the participation of Princeton students. "They'll be involved," he says, "actually helping to create a quantitative biology curriculum, where modeling and computation is integrated with teaching of biological principles. It's a direction that many of us here think the country needs to go." Key to this effort, he says, will be use of imaging systems that will explore cellular dynamics at the molecular level, integrated "with what we know about genes, about the patterns of gene expression [combined] with visual data." The result will be, he says, what hasn't been created before: "information systems [that enable] both visual data and genome and genome expression data to go into common computable interface for analysis and modeling."

Further out, he sees the center's clinical results unfolding in the diagnostics sector. "This particular project is basic research, but what we really are looking for in this kind of data integration is better informational support for clinical decision-making. In diagnostics, for example, there are so many areas where our diagnostic tests just are not sufficiently precise."

The integration of various high-tech systems, Jakobsson said, will enable "exploration across well-selected life forms: viruses, bacteria, a fungus and three mammals, two very closely related – rat and mouse – and one a bit more distant – human." These, he adds, "have been beautifully chosen to illuminate what is common across widely diverse life forms, what is synergistic or exploitative between different life forms and finely what is distinctive to humans."

He says that the various approaches used to understand these systems have become "technically sophisticated, but important synergies between them remain to be developed. This project meets this need directly." An emphasis on "visualization" in the research, Jakobsson says, will result in the creation of models "that will tell you when you put biological systems together how the pieces interact with each other to create the entire behavior of the system."

Visualization, he says, when it becomes increasingly complicated and abstract "is enormously enhanced by being able to interpret the visualizations quantitatively." And that is the role of the computational facet of the new center's research efforts. NIGMS will bring together 40 scientists from physical, biological and computational fields, with the effort established as a new undergraduate and graduate curriculum at Princeton that focuses on quantitative biology and collaborative research.

In unveiling the new center, Elias Zerhouni, MD, director of NIH, said, "The most challenging problems in biology are best tackled by combining the expertise of researchers from diverse backgrounds. Through its multidisciplinary collaboration and curriculum, this center will not only yield new insights about complex biological processes, it will also train the research leaders of tomorrow."

The Center for Quantitative Biology will focus on three key biological questions: how body patterns are established during an organism's early development, how cells control their internal functions and communicate with each other, and how viruses interact with host cells. NIGMS, one of the 27 components of NIH, has the stated mission of supporting basic biomedical research as the foundation for advances in disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention.