Tokyo

Gunaretnam Rajagopal, deputy director of Singapore's new bioinformatics institute.

Plans for a new institute in Singapore could address one of the most acute skills shortages in science by producing up to 100 trained bioinformaticists a year.

The planned Bioinformatics Institute is part of Singapore's US$1 billion-a-year effort to turn the island into a powerhouse of biomedical research. Within five years, the institute should be delivering 100 masters degrees in bioinformatics. This is more than any other institution in the world, says Limsoon Wong, director of the Kent Ridge Digital Bioinformatics Laboratories, and one of the planners behind the institute.

According to Wong, training at the institute will go well beyond the curating of data. “We will be training people how to make predictions from the data concerning interaction between proteins, and how to use these data to drive experiments,” he says.

The research and teaching institute will be housed temporarily at first, before moving to the planned 'biopolis' science park near the National University of Singapore, when it opens in two years time. The government has yet to announce its funding level, but the park is expected to start with a grant of around S$100 million (US$60 million).

The institute is likely to absorb the existing bioinformatics centre at the National University and to help service the nation's expanding genomics programme. Its own research programme will follow from the interests of the staff who will be recruited internationally.

Gunaretnam Rajagopal, a theoretical physicist at Cambridge University, has been named as the institute's deputy director, and starts work in July. “I find the opportunity to build a world-class research organization, with strong encouragement, commitment and active support of the government of Singapore, irresistible,” he says.