Bioinformatics: an interdisciplinary career for restless students

Combine computer science, programming languages, and databases with mathematics and statistics to collect, store, organize, and analyze large volumes of biological, health, and medical data. This is the mission of bioinformatics, one of the fields of knowledge that offers the most opportunities at the professional level and one of the most in demand today.

Modern medicine cannot exist without bioinformatics, which analyzes big data to study the causes of diseases and develop new treatments.

The discipline relies on advanced laboratory techniques called omics techniques to generate enormous data at the molecular level. It also uses the latest tools and artificial intelligence models, offering greater opportunities for students interested in interdisciplinary learning.

Born less than a century ago

In the 1950s, American physical chemist Margaret Dayhoff pioneered the use of computer technology to expand her knowledge of amino acids and proteins. This led to her being recognized worldwide as the “mother and father of bioinformatics”, which has since become a key area of ​​the biomedical sector.

For its part, artificial intelligence has been used for data analysis for more than 30 years. No wonder the magazine The science published that the most important scientific milestone of 2021 was the emergence of a bioinformatics program called Alphafold, which made it possible to predict with great accuracy the three-dimensional shape that proteins take to perform their functions.

Because there are hundreds of thousands of proteins in our body, this has enormous implications for understanding how it works and for developing new drugs to improve treatment for patients.

The rise to modern medicine

Personalized and precision medicine is what offers the greatest success to patients as it explores the molecular faults that cause their disease to develop. Then try to correct them with the treatment that best suits your needs.

To do this, multiple sources of information about a person are analyzed: medical reports, general medical tests (for example, electrocardiogram, ultrasound or MRI, etc.), as well as various omics methods. Among them are genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics.

When we talk about omics, we mean that from a biological sample we can study the whole, rather than just one specific part. For example, with genomics we can study variants present in the thousands of genes we have. Using proteomics, we would study which proteins are present in this biological sample and in what quantities.

Thus, these omics provide large volumes of data with different levels of information about the same biological sample. In this way, they can give us a broader and more complete picture of the patient. When the data is analyzed and we see that the results obtained are unusual, we have reason to be suspicious.

To personalized and precision medicine we can add predictive medicine, that is, the analysis of data that tells us that a healthy person may develop a disease in the future. This allows us to initiate a series of individual actions to prevent the disease from becoming pathological (preventive medicine).

If we also ensure the participation of all people involved, for whom the patient is the central axis, and we extend this to the entire population, we already have modern medicine, also called 5Ps medicine.

Required Interdisciplinary Training

Given the capabilities of omics methods, it is easy to imagine that they can generate an unprecedented amount of data. Understanding and analyzing data from each of the different layers of information and then integrating the results obtained through artificial intelligence techniques is the specialty of bioinformaticians.

They are trained to speak the interdisciplinary language necessary to navigate and understand the specialists with whom they will interact in each of the different areas of modern medicine.

Today they are considered key players in pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, medical consulting companies analyzing biological and biomedical data, hospitals and clinics, research centers and universities.

To acquire this highly sought-after specialty, you can pursue a specific master’s degree, which will serve as an introduction to the field, or pursue a specific degree or career in bioinformatics, an option that provides a much deeper and more detailed level of training for new professionals. students.