Prelude to COFES 2010: Omid Moghadam on Bioinformatics

Omid Moghadam, a biomedical researcher at Harvard Medical School and an inventor (he holds 32 patents), thinks now is the time to get into bioinformatics, which he describes as "using statistical techniques to find patterns in large [volumes of] data coming out of life sciences." He also believes computer-aided design and analysis software makers are well-positioned to take advantage of this discipline -- "the explosively growing field of bioinformatics and genomics," as he puts it.

Finding patterns could mean using high-performance computing to scan terabytes of genomic data collected to identify useful information in them. Moghadam thinks software developers could apply the same digital simulation technologies to help pharmaceutical firms develop drugs and therapies faster. "What I'm suggesting is that we find ways of designing and simulating drugs and how they behave in humans," he said. But this, he acknowledges, is also an area fraught with ethical and legal questions designers have never considered previously.

Moghadam will deliver a talk titled "From Product Informatics to BioInformatics" this Friday at the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software (COFES 2010). He shares his thoughts in this brief Q&A: