The announcement last year of a "draft" human genome sequence marks a
millennium change in Medical Research. Scientists have for the first time
a complete list of every gene in every person, including the cause of
every possible genetic disease, and thousands more possible targets for
therapeutic drugs. We now have a "parts list" for ourselves. However,
people are not lists of parts, they are complex living systems. And, as
anyone who has taken car back to the repair shop for something that
wasn't fixed the first time knows, having a complete parts list does not
mean that we know how to fix systems when they’re broken. And, in
addition to knowing all our own parts, we know "everything" about many
organisms that make us sick. The mass of detailed data is overwhelming.
The challenge and promise of Bioinformatics is to translate these "parts
lists" into diagnoses and therapies for human disease.

The challenge for the research universities of the Commonwealth of
Virginia, and for their industrial partners, is to develop new research
strategies to exploit genome information more effectively and
competitively. While the explosion of genome information will change
fundamentally our research strategies, it also presents the potential
for information overload. Understanding a physiological whole from the
sums of thousands of parts, each with distinct spatial and temporal
patterns of existence, will be overwhelming without new Bioinformatics
tools and research strategies.

The overall vision of the Virginia Bioinformatics Consortium is to build
explicit links among the universities with the result that each
university will benefit from the investments and expertise at the
others. Together, the consortium members will present a more coherent
resource, with more fully developed intellectual property, to potential
industrial partners. By building strong effective collaborative service
and research relationships among the four institutions, we believe we
can cut in half the time required for the universities in Virginia to
present comprehensive Bioinformatics resources to industrial partners.