IBM's Kovac calls for open standards in life science

The development of open industry standards that can be applied to life science and healthcare data across the board are a necessity, according to IBM's general manager for life sciences, Carol Kovac.

"We need open industry standards that allow all players to compete and integrate," she told Australian Biotechnology News at last week's BIO 2004 conference in San Francisco. "Some would say we need one common record as a standard, but I don't believe there will be one single standard. I very much believe in a set of standards that allow for systems that are interoperable."

IBM has recently merged its life sciences and healthcare business solutions practices, recognising the rapid overlap developing between them, particularly as genetic screening and other forms of predictive and personalised medicine become more likely.

"If you followed IBM's journey over the last four and a half years in the life sciences, it was originally based on how technology could make a difference in the study of basic biology. For example, in genomics and proteomics, that has been an important underpinning," Kovac said.

"The thing that was more of a surprise to us ... [was that there has been a] significantly faster convergence than we expected to apply biological technologies and information science in medicine more rapidly."

In projects like one with the Mayo Clinic that has been underway for the last couple of years, IBM is building vast repositories of patient data from medical records that are incredibly valuable sources of data for medical research.

"It's information-based medicine -- not just genomics, not just personalised medicine, but all kinds of medical data, biotech data, pharmaceutical data, diagnostic data," Kovac said.

Another project which has moved beyond its initial bounds is the company's 'ehealth' portal, developed after the US terrorist attacks in September 2001, to allow hospitals to rapidly share data between each other by making the hospitals' records interoperable as well as compliant with privacy laws. The FDA has shown interest in the system as a means of capturing adverse events, and various south-east Asian countries are also interested in the system for dealing with SARS epidemics, Kovac said.

One potential problem that will need to be overcome is the need to standardise biological and medical terminology.

"We need core IT standards on managing data and translation from one application to another, but there is an equally important need to have a commonly accepted and used medical language," said Kovac.

IBM is not just focusing on the big industry players either. In Australia the company is supporting research programs at Queensland's Institute of Molecular Bioscience, and at the Bio21 Institute in Melbourne, and is working on the Bridge program with the University of New South Wales to develop an IP brokerage.

"It's exciting the extent to which Australia has tremendous science and intellectual resources that are put to work on the world stage. We see that there are a lot of emerging players in the biotech industry," Kovac said. "This is an area where we should create informatics solutions that fit the needs -- that is right-sized solutions for a market where companies need to run efficiently. Basic business solutions for biotech that are the right scale."