Smith School's BIO|PhARMA Club Sponsors Industry Networking Event with Dr. Stephen Hewitt

It takes $750 million to 1.5 billion to bring a new drug to the market, says Stephen Hewitt, MD, PhD, clinical investigator and director at the Center for Cancer Research at the National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Health. Hewitt addressed members of the BIO IT Coalition of the Greater Washington, D.C., Area and students, faculty, and staff of the Smith School at an industry-networking event on March 31, 2004. When you are dealing with that much money on a single product, it's no surprise that a keen understanding of business processes is critical to success in the field of bioinformatics and biotechnology.

Bioinformatics is the process by which information technology is used to model biological processes, explains second-year Smith MBA Casey McHargue, out-going president of the BIO|PhARMA club.

"The potential is enormous as IT is being combined with insights from the completion of the Human Genome Project to predict health problems earlier and create better therapies for them," says McHargue. "In essence, bioinformatics allows drug companies to develop therapies more quickly, doctors to diagnose diseases earlier, drugs to come to market quicker, and the world to better understand how the human body works at a molecular level." From a business standpoint, this means that drugs can be more easily targeted to the right people and therapies can be developed more cost and time effectively, adds McHargue.

Smith's BIO|PhARMA Business Association in partnership with the BIO IT Coalition presented the event, which included a networking luncheon and a talk by Hewitt, titled: "Challenges in Translational Medicine" Intellectual Property, Commercialization Challenges, and the Changing Focus of Current Research.

Hewitt is classically trained in both medicine and genetics and considers himself primarily an "academic researcher." He describes translational medicine as "bench to bedside." Estimating that historically less than one percent of scientific experiments (basic research) actually help the patient, Hewitt says there is a shift in research "from molecular to high throughput biology from the understanding of individual proteins to the understanding of biological processes."

Using the images of Navajo rugs (pictured left), Hewitt asks the audience how they would recreate the rug's pattern in a database. "It is too multi-dimensional you have to see everything as a whole," he says. He relates the rugs to the complexity of plugging biological processes into multi-dimensional databases. In the future, Hewitt predicts "a convergence of technologies like you've never seen the pathologist versus the machine."

Smith's BIO|PhARMA Business Association is planning a few more events in the coming weeks, including a speech by William Haseltine, PhD, chairman and CEO of Human Genome Sciences, and one of the pioneers of the genomics revolution. Visit the BIO|PhARMA Club Web site for more information.

About the BIO IT Coalition

The BIO IT Coalition is a not-for-profit organization that promotes the development of bioinformatics and the convergence of bioscience and information technology as an integral discipline for the advancement of the biotechnology industry. The work of the coalition is achieved through education, collaboration, professional development and partnership. The group is chaired by Steve A. Mandell (pictured, right), a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Pepper Hamilton LLP. The Coalition's Third Annual BIO IT Spring Conference, BIO IT Opportunities: Innovation and Partnership, will be held April 27-28 in McLean, Va.

About the BIO|PhARMA Business Association

The BIO|PhARMA Business Association is a graduate student organization comprised of MBA students from the Robert H. Smith School of Business. The association promotes the development of the Smith School of Business as the premier MBA program for producing business leaders in the life science, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology industries. Through regular meetings and events, the club actively creates relationships with industry leaders and informs the Smith community of BioBusiness advances and career opportunities.