Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The Killer Application
In the biotechnology industry, every researcher and entrepreneur hopes to develop or discover the
next "killer app"—the one application that will bring the world to his or her door and provide funding
for R&D, marketing, and production. For example, in general computing, the electronic spreadsheet
and the desktop laser printer have been the notable killer apps. The spreadsheet not only
transformed the work of accountants, research scientists, and statisticians, but the underlying tools
formed the basis for visualization and mathematical modeling. The affordable desktop laser printer
created an industry and elevated the standards of scientific communications, replacing rough graphs
created on dot-matrix printers with high-resolution images.
As in other industries, it's reasonable to expect that using computational methods to leverage the
techniques of molecular biology is a viable approach to increasing the rate of innovation and
discovery. However, readers looking for a rationale for learning the computational techniques as they
apply to the bioinformatics that are described here and in the following chapters can ask "What might
be the computer-enabled 'killer app' in bioinformatics?" That is, what is the irresistible driving force
that differentiates bioinformatics from a purely academic endeavor? Although there are numerous
military and agricultural opportunities, one of the most commonly cited examples of the killer app is
in personalized medicine, as illustrated in
Figure 1-1
.
Figure 1-1. The Killer Application. The most commonly cited "killer app" of
biotech is personalized medicine—the custom, just-in-time delivery of
medications (popularly called "designer drugs") tailored to the patient's
condition.
Instead of taking a generic or over-the-counter drug for a particular condition, a patient would
submit a tissue sample, such as a mouth scraping, and submit it for analysis. A microarray would
then be used to analyze the patient's genome and the appropriate compounds would be prescribed.
The drug could be a cocktail of existing compounds, much like the drug cocktails used to treat cancer
patients today.
