Celera takes lead in funding fellowship that will be a boon to research and industry
Adding postdoctoral positions to a UC Berkeley research center may seem a routine step, but for the Center for Computational Biology, the anticipated impact will be far more momentous.
The center’s Innovation Fellows will form a much-needed cadre of experts in both computation and experimentation, equipped to interpret vast data on the human genome and find new biological insights. Provided with postdoctoral advisers in each area and training unlike any other, they will gain skills unavailable through a traditional Ph.D. program and perform work impossible for any single research group.
“Our goal is to have people with truly interdisciplinary training who can do experimentation and computation at a very high level. They will become part of a pipeline of a new breed of cross-trained people who will be vital to research and industry,” says Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology Jasper Rine, who directs the Center for Computational Biology, a program of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). The center brings together more than 30 leading computational and genomic biologists to promote interdisciplinary research and education — ultimately to transform drug discovery and healthcare itself.
Knowledge to advance medical care
The Innovation Fellows will help further a key goal: to ensure it is possible to interpret the tremendous amount of data that will result from human genome sequencing affordable enough to become routine in health care. The center has about five years to meet this goal — the expected timeline for sequencing to cost just $1,000, or a tiny fraction of the $1 billion required less than a decade ago.
Rine sees ample need for the fellows’ understanding of both computation and experimentation. He explains, “When I started my Ph.D. program it was hard to get even a small amount of data from experiments, so the interpretation typically wasn’t very computationally challenging. Today, we’re swimming in a sea of data that needs interpretation. But at this point, we can interpret less than one percent of the sequence variation data from the human genome. We can’t afford to wait for experimentation to interpret the rest of it. Moreover, a better understanding of computational tools can allow large and complex studies, such as clinical trials, to be better designed and more likely to succeed.”
Interpreting the data is crucial to medical diagnostics. For example, some variants in genes are easy to classify as either harmful or harmless to a person, but the significance of others can remain unclear. Increased knowledge of the data would make it possible to predict whether a variant matters even when this isn’t obvious.
Success in interpreting the wealth of data, coupled with relatively low-cost genome sequencing, could lead to medical care informed by individuals’ genetic information and tailored to each person. Diseases could be predicted, prevented, diagnosed, and treated more readily, thereby saving lives. Rine explains, “Human destiny is written in those different genome sequences. We hope to use computation to point to variations that are both important for health and enabling. For example, a DNA sequence variation indicating a risk factor for a specific disease allows one to increase surveillance.”
Celera takes lead in meeting funding challenge
First Rine and the center he leads need to put the Innovation Fellows in place. As is often the case, the challenge is funding: federal sources that traditionally support science, such as the National Institutes of Health, have been taking a cautious path, advancing efforts that Rine describes as “conventional, low risk, and orthodox.” In contrast, he says, “What we’re trying to do is fundamentally not orthodox. But industry and philanthropy can catalyze this kind of high-risk, high-gain training that has fueled the economy of the state. The idea is to ‘buy down’ high-risk projects until they are orthodox, achievable, and hence sustainable by conventional federal funders.”
Rine already has his first backer. With financial support from Celera, an Alameda-based molecular diagnostics business focused on personalized disease management, the center will gain an Innovation Fellow for three years. The company is well acquainted with Berkeley’s capabilities, having collaborated with the University on several occasions. In addition, Celera Chief Scientific Officer and Vice President of Research and Development Tom White earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry at Berkeley and encouraged involvement with the Center for Computational Biology.
“We are impressed by the range of skills and the innovative, pioneering nature of the research at Berkeley,” says Celera’s John Sninsky, who heads the company’s discovery research effort. “You can certainly learn a lot and benefit substantially from collaboration, but the center’s range of interests and quality of science, and the character of the people, just make it a treat.”
With Celera’s funding for one Innovation Fellow in hand, Rine is looking to other companies for similar support. He hopes the single fellowship quickly becomes four or five, and he can envision an international competition to select the recipients of these positions.
Significant impact for industry and academia
The potential benefits extend far beyond Berkeley. The new knowledge of computation and data interpretation that the fellows are likely to generate could be used widely and translated into commercial applications. It could help companies introduce drugs and services sooner, and at a lower cost and reduced risk to their businesses. The fellows’ training would also be crucial to companies involved in genetic association studies that seek to link disease and its genetic basis.
Celera, for example, is interested in gathering functional data on the role genes play in disease mechanisms. If gene variants cross between diseases and a common mechanism is identified, a drug to treat one of the diseases may also be a useful response to the other.
The Innovation Fellows would also have a strong impact in the academic setting. With the training they receive, says Rine, “there will be a ‘trickle down’ effect of a new generation of biologists who embrace the benefits that computation can provide.”
The effect at Berkeley would of course be most immediate. According to Rine, the very nature of a major research university and the relationship among faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates makes this inevitable. He says, “Anything learned by any one of us is transmitted to the others.”
