Integrating Engineering Mindset Critical on Road to Successful Translational Medicine

Writing in the July-August issue of American Scientist, the magazine of the Sigma Xi association, Michael Liebman, chief scientific officer of the Windber Research Institute, which is located in southern Pennsylvania, makes a case for integrating an engineer's approach into translational medicine.

Why? Well, this is what he writes:

Because an engineer uses the fruits of science to feed the appetite of technology. Unlike scientists, who tend to approach problems from a "bottom-up" perspective by collecting data and seeking patterns, engineers take a "top-down" approach, probing a specific system for clues, taking it apart and considering how each component can be handled in a tailored solution. An engineer is a problem solver rather than a hypothesis generator.

He says that while genomics, proteomics and other high-throughput technologies are "seductively powerful," the generation of data is "far outstripping scientists' ability to convert it into usable knowledge."

He suggests that an engineer's approach requires that translational-medicine research place more emphasis on "going from the bedside to the bench, rather than the other way around."

New Biology Economy Take: Liebman is espousing the essential tenent of the new biology economy and this is that we are only just understanding biology and that in order to advance, we need to combine the tools from different disciplines, the analysis and problem-solving skills used by engineers, physicists, chemists, etc., to get a larger picture of what is biological truth. It's an evolutionary process, but one that institutes like Windber are employing, and building new facilities that bring these folks together.

Windber in July began the process of moving its nearly 70 employees into a new 36,000 square-foot, $8 million research facility.

Windber describes itself as: "one of the most integrated clinical, genomic and proteomic research facilities in the world, acquiring, storing thousands of clinical samples each year within its tissue repository and carrying out analysis using a proprietary data warehouse and analysis system."