By Kim Coghill

Washington Editor

WASHINGTON ¿ The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) is helping to spearhead an effort to develop a standard platform for storing and accessing information related to life sciences.

The need for such a standard has become evident over the past several years as more and more technologies such as genomic sequencing, combinatorial chemistry, high-throughput screening and virtual drug and seed development have produced enormous amounts of information. And although the plethora of information should simplify research, it actually complicates it because so often data are stored in different countries and in different formats.

Thus, the birth of the Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium (I3C), a group of 34 or so companies including the likes of IBM, of Armonk, N.Y.; Sun Microsystems Inc., of Palo Alto, Calif.; Gene Logic Inc., of Gaithersburg, Md.; and Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., that have the shared goal of developing a common platform to exchange information and tools more efficiently.

Morrie Ruffin, vice president of business development for Washington-based BIO, said the focus is to bring together informatics and biotech companies that are disseminating and accessing data and tools with leaders from the IT community that are focusing their business on facilitating that process. So far, he said, cooperation and support among various biotechs has been positive.

¿This initiative is a result of feedback we have received from our members who have been telling us consistently that the limiting issue is the ability to have all the data sets work together and to come up with tools that can be applied to a number of different data sets,¿ Ruffin said.

BIO intends to announce formation of the consortium at its annual international meeting scheduled to begin June 24 in San Diego.

¿We are now working on organizational pieces of this so that when we announce it, we will have established an actual repository for the standards,¿ Ruffin said. ¿As work progresses on these standards, we will have a central web site where people will go to get information about this.¿

In the most recent organizational meeting in April, the group agreed to begin working on ¿use cases¿ as part of a working prototype that will be described in more detail when the consortium is announced in San Diego, according to a prepared statement by BIO.

The initiative is expected to accelerate discovery, establish a common communications standard protocol that is extensible and delivered to the community in a timely fashion, improve the flow of information through regulatory processes and facilitate communication of biological knowledge to foster education and commerce.