Nanolab chips may accomplish in minutes what microarrays do in a day

Leroy Hood is pioneering the field of systems biology, which promises predictive, preventative and personalized medicine. Hood, the founding president of the 170-person Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, describes the coming changes: "Biology is really about digital information, and systems biology is going to tell us how information operates in biological systems. We want to develop mathematical models that would predict the behavior of biological systems. That will have significant social, moral and ethical challenges for medicine, insurance, education and other fields."

This new field needs new tools. Hood developed an early DNA analyzer that enabled the human-genome sequencing project. Now he is collaborating with six researchers on a device that could someday conduct as many as 2,000 tests on individual cells in real-time. The so-called nanolab chip may be able to do in a few minutes, with a few cells, what today's gene and protein microarrays take hours or a day to accomplish with relatively large biological samples.

With the advent of such tools, Hood predicts that advances in systems biology will ultimately expand the human life span by 10 to 30 years over the next two decades. That's one disruption everyone welcomes.

The effort requires a multidisciplinary approach, of the sort practiced at the institute Hood co-founded in 2000. Here, biologists, mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists and physicists work on DNA sequencing, genotyping, DNA arrays and cell separations.

"I believe biologists working in tandem with specialists in fields such as math, computer science and engineering will make some of the most important scientific findings in history," said James H. Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, at the dedication of Stanford University's bioengineering center, which bears his name.

OTHER PROFILES
Takeshi Uchiyamada
John Deng
Y.W. Chung
Theodore Berger and John Granacki
Dean Kamen
Leroy Hood
Ken Kutaragi
Jim Barton
Complete Profiles List >>

Nanolab chips may accomplish in minutes what microarrays do in a day

Leroy Hood is pioneering the field of systems biology, which promises predictive, preventative and personalized medicine. Hood, the founding president of the 170-person Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, describes the coming changes: "Biology is really about digital information, and systems biology is going to tell us how information operates in biological systems. We want to develop mathematical models that would predict the behavior of biological systems. That will have significant social, moral and ethical challenges for medicine, insurance, education and other fields."

This new field needs new tools. Hood developed an early DNA analyzer that enabled the human-genome sequencing project. Now he is collaborating with six researchers on a device that could someday conduct as many as 2,000 tests on individual cells in real-time. The so-called nanolab chip may be able to do in a few minutes, with a few cells, what today's gene and protein microarrays take hours or a day to accomplish with relatively large biological samples.

With the advent of such tools, Hood predicts that advances in systems biology will ultimately expand the human life span by 10 to 30 years over the next two decades. That's one disruption everyone welcomes.

The effort requires a multidisciplinary approach, of the sort practiced at the institute Hood co-founded in 2000. Here, biologists, mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists and physicists work on DNA sequencing, genotyping, DNA arrays and cell separations.

"I believe biologists working in tandem with specialists in fields such as math, computer science and engineering will make some of the most important scientific findings in history," said James H. Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, at the dedication of Stanford University's bioengineering center, which bears his name.

OTHER PROFILES
Takeshi Uchiyamada
John Deng
Y.W. Chung
Theodore Berger and John Granacki
Dean Kamen
Leroy Hood
Ken Kutaragi
Jim Barton
Complete Profiles List >>