In the future Bioinformatics is envisioned to change everything that touches upon life sciences. This includes helping to design bacteria that could efficiently produce natural gas from garbage, and plants that could remove toxic metals from abandoned industrial sites.
Today, however, researchers are increasingly turning to computers to explore medical science through computer simulation. Computer simulations aren't new in non-medical research and development. Much of climatology and geology is modeled with computers, and engineers routinely design products using mathematical simulations rather than building and testing prototypes. But such computer applications have been slow to reach people studying the vagaries of the human body. Computer simulation also helps aid drug development and medical care by the use of virtual patients. From one to the next, virtual patients may respond differently to drugs depending on their health parameters, just as real patients do, and their diseases may take different courses. But because the researchers know the exact differences between their virtual patients, they can more easily tease out the most important factors in complicated interactions. Virtual patients may also respond differently when the modelers use different views of how a disease develops. Computer simulations of basic human biology are closely intertwined with the commercial quest to develop new drugs quickly and inexpensively. Pharmaceutical companies now take more than a decade to move a compound from the lab to the clinic, and many potential drugs fall by the wayside in that journey. Companies report that about 20 percent of the drugs that succeed in preliminary trials are abandoned once doctors test them in large, expensive clinical trials because either the drugs don't work as expected, or troubling side effects emerge. Drug companies hope that computer simulations will focus their efforts on the candidate drugs most likely to work in people.
