Synergy in Medicine

There have been some very interesting developments in the overlap between biotech and medicine in recent days. First this report on the Department of Health and Human Services:

"HHS team tackles genetics, EHR integration"

The Department of Health and Human Services is launching an effort to integrate genomics into clinical information systems so that a patient’s genetic makeup can be considered in preventing, diagnosing and treating disease.

HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt said he has “put together a team that is working together across HHS,” with representatives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and other health agencies.

Innocuous enough -- fairly interesting and quite timely. Then, this week:

"Americans Share Nobel Prize in Medicine"

NEW YORK (AP) -- Two Americans won the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for discovering a way to silence specific genes, a revolutionary finding that scientists are scrambling to harness for fighting illnesses as diverse as cancer, heart disease and AIDS.

Andrew Z. Fire, 47, of Stanford University, and Craig C. Mello, 45, of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, will share the $1.4 million prize.

They were honored remarkably swiftly for work they published together just eight years ago. It revealed a process called RNA interference, which occurs in plants, animals and humans. It's important for regulating gene activity and helping defend against viruses.

Great news! But wait -- there's more! Later this week:

"American Wins Nobel Chemistry Prize"

NEW YORK (AP) -- Nearly a half-century after his father was awarded a Nobel Prize, a Stanford University professor won his own Wednesday for groundbreaking research into how cells read their genes, fundamental work that could help lead to new therapies.

Discoveries by Roger D. Kornberg, 59, have helped set the stage for developing drugs to fight cancer, heart disease and other illnesses, experts said.

At a press conference, Kornberg said the immediate application of his work is in making better antibiotics for diseases such as tuberculosis. ''There will be specific cures for several
diseases in the next decade,'' he said.

Wow! Great news again! Especially for Stanford, which seems to be hosting a lot of Nobel activity these days. Interestingly enough, work recognized for both the medicine and the chemistry prize was done in the past ten years, a relatively short "marinating" time in Nobel Prize terms.

Great news but a little eerie as well. Genomics for clinical and medical applications is a pretty well-established business already -- but why all this interest all of a sudden?

I think it's synergy. These are exciting times for healthcare IT. We're moving way past worn-out debates about EMR's and whether physicians, patients, and providers ought to be networked in a Web 2.0 world. This is really progressive IT stuff, the stuff that innovations are made of. The synergy is between information technology and bioinformatics, leading to a brave new world that those two disciplines will foster. If you have any doubts, check out initiatives such as the Personal Genome Project. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

Medicine will never be the same.