Biobanks a must for personalised medicine

Future drug development efforts are likely to depend heavily on access to patient and clinical data, according to IBM's Dr Bruce Ross, who gave a keynote speech at the recent Health Informatics Conference 2004 held in Brisbane.

Ross, solutions manager for IBM Australia's Health and Life Sciences division, said that while advances in genomics and proteomics would lead to a better understanding of an individual's predisposition to disease and specific responses to drugs, as well as disease causation, it would be some time before these advances led to personalised medicine.

"Genome-based diagnostics are not in routine use yet, but many groups are doing translational research," he said.

But Ross said that genomic data on its own would not be enough.

"If we're really going to advance medicine, we need large populations of patients with well defined diseases and longitudinal medical records," he told Australian Biotechnology News this week.

"If we don't have those it will always be a struggle as we won't have the statistical support."

A number of medical centres in the US, including the Mayo Clinic, UCSF Medical Center and the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute, were implementing systems to capture all clinical data and patient records into mine-able databases, Ross said, and similar projects on a smaller scale were in development in Australia.

Ross said the concept of centralised 'biobanks' was also being looked at around the world as a way forward. In this model, biological samples, phenotypic data and research data from a variety of institutions would be held in a central location and made available to researchers for data-mining purposes.

"There is an impetus to get the clinical data together and bring in research data later," he said.