|
Georgia Tech has created the Integrative BioSystems Institute to explore new technologies and methods to collect and analyze millions of pieces of biological information in order to form a more complete picture of how life works and how the environment affects living things.
"In biology, we can now measure the expression of 50,000 genes at a time. Needless to say, no one can analyze these massive amounts of data by hand," said Eberhard Voit, founding director of the institute, David D. Flanagan chair and Georgia Research Alliance eminent scholar in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. "Computer methods and mathematical models are needed to help us put all these pieces of information together in order to solve some of the grand challenges in biology."
The institute will work to create devices and techniques for elucidating biological systems; analyze experimental results with methods of engineering, mathematics, physics and computer science; and use insights from these multidisciplinary investigations to attack biomedical tasks that were previously too complex to address.
"The ultimate goal, which we can only see in the distant future, is to develop simulations of entire cell systems capable of predicting how a body — or even a specific patient — will respond to a multitude of stimuli, medications and environmental exposures and lead to chronic diseases like diabetes and cancer," Voit said.
Research efforts will focus on understanding the development of normal cells into cancer cells, the interaction between humans and microbes in the environment and the development of enabling techniques for analyzing biological systems.
The Integrative BioSystems Institute is a collaboration between the Colleges of Science, Engineering and Computing to provide a physical and intellectual focus for integrative, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research in the quantitative life sciences.
|
