An interdisciplinary approach to medical research could help advance studies on cancer, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes and a number of other maladies, Dartmouth genetics professor Scott Gerber said. Gerber was one of the organizers of the first annual Dartmouth Integrative Biology Symposium held Wednesday in Alumni Hall. Speakers at the conference described how researchers can apply integrative biology to medical afflictions.
The conference aimed to introduce Dartmouth's research community to the benefits of integrative biology, according to co-organizer Joshua Hamilton, associate director for shared resources at Dartmouth Medical School. He and other members of the Integrative Biology Group at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center's Norris Cotton Cancer Center began planning the conference over a year ago, he said.
"The purpose is to show both the technology that's available and how it can be applied to solving complex biology problems," Hamilton said.
Gerber, who is also the director of proteomics -- the the large-scale study of proteins -- at DHMC, helped organize the conference as well.
"Biomedical research today is very diverse in terms of the actual experimental technologies that people use to study biological problems," Gerber said. "We have people that are chemists by training, computer scientists, physicists, biochemists, and what we're trying to do today is to bring together all of these unique technologies."
Gerber focuses on protein research, he said, and collaborates with pharmacology and toxicology professor Ethan Dmitrovsky to find early indicators of lung cancer.
The conference featured 14 experts -- eight from the College -- who spoke about biostatics, genomics, bioinformatics and proteomics, and how to integrate each of these biological programs systematically.
"It would be a huge success if people could walk away from the symposium and think about their own science in a way they had never thought about it before," Gerber said.
The speakers from the College were chosen based on their ability to succinctly convey their research and introduce outside researchers to their field, Hamilton said.
"We have a number of experts [at Dartmouth] in each of these fields and we thought about people that are not only doing great research in this area, but are also great presenters who can get across the point of how systems biology integrates all of this research," Hamilton said.
During his speech, keynote speaker Leroy Hood connected integrative biology to medicine. Considered the father of systems biology, Hood is the president and co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Wash., where he and other scientists create collaborative approaches to biology and medicine.
Hood spoke about the systems view of treatment, where researchers study networks in major organs within humans to see what happens when they are stimulated negatively by genetic or environmental signals.
"If we put together this systems view of disease, over the next 10 to 20 years we'll get medicine that moves from its current reactive state to one that's predictive, personalized and preventative," Hood said.
Hood and a group of colleagues at the California Institute of Technology invented the DNA gene sequencer and synthesizer and its protein counterpart. In 2007, Hood was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He is currently one of seven scientists out of a pool of more than 6,000 to be elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine.
"One goal was to let the Dartmouth community know what we have here," said Craig Tomlinson, director of the genomics and microarray facility at the College. "It's amazing what goes on here that people don't know about."
