IBM and the Canadian biotechnology company MDS PROEOMIX announced the establishment of a non-profit venture called Blue Print, which will serve as an online clearinghouse for scientific research, designed to help achieve breakthroughs in the field of genetic research and accelerate drug development. The site's database will be made available to researchers from all over the world, including from Israel, who study the interactions between proteins in the human body and the bodies of other living creatures. In addition to academic researchers, biotechnology companies, government research institutions from all over the world and editors of scientific journals from all over the world will also be able to use the research database and add their research to it.
The two companies will invest 5.8 million dollars in the project.
"Most of the knowledge is obtainable but it is very distributed" says Francis Willett, who manages the project. "We will gather this vast information under one roof." In the first phase, 200 articles from scientific journals and about 40 smaller databases dealing with the interaction between proteins will be added to the website.
The study of proteins - proteomics, is the next step for scientists who hope to take advantage of the interrelationships between genes to develop drugs. This is after the decoding of the human genome was completed. Some compare this step as a jump from first grade reading studies (expressed in decoding the genome) straight to reading a complicated and complex scientific book. The need for a large database is due to the fact that between 30 thousand genes there is a huge number of connections.
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