IBM charts out mega bio-info plan for India

Kavita Nair in Mumbai

India is poised to play a major role in IBM’s global foray into the life sciences domain. Little is known about the company’s activities in this sphere in India, and in one of its first few disclosures to the media IBM opens up on its plans for India. IBM Global Services India (IGSI) Exports in collaboration with IBM India Research Labs is working to generate intellectual properties in algorithms which solve critical problems in life sciences. IGSI (Exports) is also developing ‘Wrappers’, a software module for the IBM DiscoveryLink, a solution designed by IBM, to address the requirements of data integration in the life sciences sphere.

Dr Uday Shukla, director IGSI says, “IBM is globally looking at life sciences as a strategic area for research and development. In keeping with this focus, IGSI (Exports) has been playing a critical role in service delivery to IBM customers globally using the best of IBM and the Indian IT advantages. India has the credentials, resources and quality to service the segment well in the coming years.”

He explains that life sciences is composed of sub-units and each of them has its own set of requirements. The current focus is on building prototypes and demonstrable pilot applications for real-life problems faced by life sciences projects.

The Technology Incubation Center (TIC) created by the IGSI (Exports) has embarked on one such project—a tool that helps in data discovery from disparate data sources. Life Science researchers are faced with the problem of scanning a variety of bio-information sources like gene sequences, gene expressions, protein structure and function, etc, in order to discover critical results. The tool in question works to facilitate an exhaustive search by linking all elements of the query through common parameters.

Another activity that TIC is involved in is evolving techniques to represent and work with 3-dimensional structural data of proteins that will enable rapid structural comparison and discovery of motifs (unique patterns in protein structure or sequences). “There is a pressing need to generate algorithms in protein structure prediction which will enable us to compare structures. This is of paramount importance right now because of large scale protein structure modeling at the genome level that is being sought by life science researchers,” says Dr Shukla.

The Data Management Competency Center (DMCoC) at IGSI (Exports) also contributes to the life sciences initiative by building competencies in developing, testing and implementing Bioinformatics databases, user tools, utilities and applications.