Bioinformatics needs support from govt and institutions: Victoria Prize winner

There is currently a dearth of bioinformaticians in this country, and if we don’t have more entering the profession, there will be insufficient numbers to analyse the torrents of data that will be generated in the life sciences over the next several decades.

Yet, according to Professor Terry Speed, the director of the bioinformatics division at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, the problem isn’t attracting young people to the field, but giving them a clear career path that won’t stall and see them veer off into another field.

“What’s really lacking is a career path for them,” he told ALS. “I meet plenty of people interested, but if they miss out on a scholarship or funding, there’s nowhere for them to go.”

Speed puts this down to government funding bodies, like the NHMRC, and research institutions not providing sufficient support for the field.

"It seems many institutes value scientists who generate data more than those who analyse it."

Professor Speed today received the 2012 Victorian Prize for Science and Innovation for his work over the past two decades at the forefront of bioinformatics.

His academic interests over the past two decades are broad, including looking at the various pathways used by the body to metabolise glucose into energy, working on refining custom resequencing chips, which enable specific regions on the genome to be scanned quickly and cheaply, and methods to reconstruct evolutionary history from the genome.

During his career Speed has developed techniques that have been used in many fields of biological research including cancer, infectious diseases, immunology and inherited diseases.

“One of my main interests is in taking large data sets collected over long periods and cleaning them up so they can be aggregated and analysed together.”

This involves removing any artefacts that seep in to the data that might lead to either false positives or false negatives.

Speed’s bioinformatics expertise has also led to his involvement in The Cancer Genome Atlas, a US-based project that is charting the genomic changes involved in more than 20 types of cancer. This will help understand different forms of cancer and find new ways to control them.