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“Biomedical research, biotechnology hold the key”

Special Correspondent

An integrated, automated management of disease, using small sensors in the body, will be part of the future: Baltimore

— Photo: S. R. Raghunathan

New vistas: Nobel laureate David Baltimore at a lecture on “New Avenues to Health” in Chennai on Friday.

CHENNAI: Speaking to a world that continues to treat diseases with the remedies of the past, Nobel laureate David Baltimore heralded the arrival of a brave new world, fresh with new avenues to treat the same diseases, indicating that the way ahead lay in biomedical research and biotechnology.

With his command over knowledge of treatment — past, present and future — Dr. Baltimore, who was co-awarded the Nobel for the discovery of Reverse Transcriptase in 1975, set out a list of areas that will dominate the way treatment works in the coming years.

Dr. Baltimore was in Chennai on Friday as part of a three-city lecture series organised by Cell Press, the Massachusetts-based publisher of biomedical journals and the Chennai-based TnQ Books and Journals.

“Not perfect”

Dr. Baltimore, the current president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said the present methods to treat diseases (surgery, radiation and drugs) were very powerful and worked wonders, but they were not perfect. There were still some areas of medical science that these methods had not resolved, a good case in point being cancer. While almost every thing that was learnt about cancer had come in the last 30-40 years, it was clear that most cancers were still not being treated effectively.

There were a number of infectious diseases that were being routinely taken care of with antibiotics. Again, he said, antibiotics were not perfect and there were several diseases such as malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis “that we have not been able to deal with at all.”

There was an enormous opportunity in the future, especially in drug development. But, there were lots of other ways one had to take for dealing with disease.

Genomics

First, he brought up genomics. “We have to find genes relevant to diseases. All of disease is an interaction between the environment and the individual.” So in order to understand the disease, it was necessary to understand the genetic components. With the recent sequencing of the human genome, there were whole genome association methods that allowed linking of disease with genes.

“This is the coming of a very powerful way to link genetics with disease,” he said, adding that it would also provide clues on how to develop drugs.

Certain genetic diseases were ameliorated using gene therapy and others would be in the future, Dr. Baltimore forecast. “But there are lots of other uses that will not involve attacking disease-related genes in a direct way.”

Dr. Baltimore pointed out that an integrated, automated management of disease, using small sensors in the body, would be part of the future. For example, in the management of some types of diabetes, a patient needed insulin but required high levels of insulin only when the sugar levels were up, not throughout the day. “Today, the only way we deal with this is to inject insulin, the levels of which go up and fall over the day. This is not the right path,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a sensor in the body that could sense the glucose and would tell a pump to release a whiff of insulin when it is needed? That we don’t do today, but we are trying to do today.”

A combination of medical doctors and engineers, he assured the audience, would make that happen.

Another new avenue would be to design proteins that had therapeutic value. This was difficult, but with better understanding of genes, the time would come in the relatively near future when that kind of design work would be more effective. He also made a case for cell therapy that would go beyond the limited way in which it was being used currently (bone marrow transplantation).

Dr. Baltimore indicated that there were huge frontiers to be reached in drug discovery, personalised medicine and synthetic biology. He also provided insights into some of the projects now on in his laboratory, particularly the one on engineering immunity, by using biomedical engineering and genetic engineering methods to modify the behaviour of the immune system.

N. Ram, Editor-in-Chief, The Hindu, introduced Dr. Baltimore. Mariam Ram, Managing Director, TnQ, and Lynne Herndon, President and CEO, Cell Press, also spoke.

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