Rich,
Throughout your postings it seems your primary interest in this "scientific"
endeavor is the underlying "fee-based" service. Unfortunately, it might
stimulate more "scientific" interest if the underlying goal was to develop
such useful tool for research purposes without a drive to make a profit from
all of the scientific collaboration that went into the development.
"Rich Cooper" <richcooper1 at mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:8td91h$rk3$1 at slb1.atl.mindspring.net...
> Thanks for your comments, Petr:
>> > Rich Cooper wrote:
> > ...
> > > Does anyone see a need for commercially supported simulation
> > > services that might provide the support researchers need to conduct
> > > very large, very complex simulations? Something that might be an
> > > ASP type of service, with a modest monthly fee ...
> >
> > Personally, I think you are probably ahead of your time here. You are
> > asking about the viability of a commercial service in cellular
> > simulations, as if there already existed an accepted methodology for
> > mathematical simulation of cellular processes. The fact is, Science
> > will have to come before Business here, but in my opinion this kind of
> > science is not yet mature enough.
> >
> > Please note in the Chemical & Engineering News, October 16, 2000, an
> > article on page 24. You'll see a picture of Nobel laureate Alfred
> > Gilman (discoverer of G-protein signaling in cells) sitting in front of
> > a computer, talking about the "Alliance for Cellular Signaling"
> > (http://afcs.swmed.edu/). He is the director of this new organization,
> > funded by the federal government (National Institute of General Medical
> > Sciences) and a dozen pharma companies.
> >
> > The idea is to put on the Internet, for a free access by anyone, partial
> > results from experimental and theoretical (simulation) studies of
> > individual pieces of the cellular signaling puzzle. The "Alliance" folks
> > talk about individual "molecule pages", which anyone will be able to
> > access and even re-publish in their own papers if they can find use for
> > the results. For speed of publication, there will not be journal
> > articles, but the "Alliance" website(s) will be internally
> > peer-reviewed.
> >
> > ...
> >
> > Anyway, it's all just at the beginning. It'll take quite a few years of
> > cranking out tons of experimental data, as well as developing entirely
> > new computational strategies, before anyone will be able to build a
> > credible mathematical model of a cancerous cell. I think that is what
> > you are interested in selling, but if you look at
> > http://afcs.swmed.edu/, you can probably see that the market for your
> > service probably isn't there given the state of the basic science in
> > this area.
>> Yes, the AFCS's goals are very much in line with mine. They want to
> build the "Molecule Pages", including tables of data as defined on their
> site. And you're right, the data isn't there yet - they posted a five
> year goal and a ten year goal.
>> My goal is not to get into specific areas of biological research, but to
> put together a tool that researchers can eventually use to study disease
> processes, in greater detail than they could without the tool. The tool
> should be able to use public databases like the AFCS's, FlyBase,
> Mus, and MitoMap.
>> My goal is to provide a tool that is so useful to researchers that they
> are please to pay a reasonable usage fee for the results they get.
> Certainly from the start, there will be many databases. I saw one
> web site that claimed there are presently about 500 databases that
> make genetic information public. Surely a tool that could be used
> by researchers to unify the vast data resources would be needed.
>> Is that more in line with the present state of conditions?
>> Sincerely,
> Rich Cooper
>>>> > Hope this helps,
> >
> >
> > - Petr
> _____________________________________________________________________
> > P e t r K u z m i c, Ph.D. mailto:pkuzmic at biokin.com> > BioKin Ltd. * Software and Consulting http://www.biokin.com>>
