Bioinformatics FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) - What is bioinformatics

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What is Medical Informatics?

The Medical Informatics FAQ (no relation) provides the following definition:

"Biomedical Informatics is an emerging discipline that has been defined as the study, invention, and implementation of structures and algorithms to improve communication, understanding and management of medical information."

That FAQ also points here

Aamir Zakaria, the author of the FAQ, emphasises that medical informatics is more concerned with structures and algorithms for the manipulation of medical data, rather than with the data itself.

This suggests that one difference between bioinformatics and medical informatics as disciplines lies with their approaches to the data; there are bioinformaticians interested in the theory behind the manipulation of that data and there are bioinformatics scientists concerned with the data itself and its biological implications. (I believe that a good bioinformatics researcher should be interested in both of these aspects of the field.)

Medical informatics, for practical reasons, is more likely to deal with data obtained at "grosser" biological levels---that is information from super-cellular systems, right up to the population level---while most bioinformatics is concerned with information about cellular and biomolecular structures and systems.

On both of these points I'd be happy for any medical informatics specialists to correct me.

What is Cheminformatics?

The Web advertisement for Cambridge Healthtech Institute's Sixth Annual Cheminformatics conference describes the field thus:

"the combination of chemical synthesis, biological screening, and data-mining approaches used to guide drug discovery and development"

but this, again, sounds more like a field being identified by some of its most popular (and lucrative) activities, rather than by including all the diverse studies that come under its general heading.

The story of one of the most successful drugs of all time, penicillin, seems bizarre, but the way we discover and develop drugs even now has similarities, being the result of chance, observation and a lot of slow, intensive chemistry. Until recently, drug design always seemed doomed to continue to be a labour-intensive, trial-and-error process. The possibility of using information technology, to plan intelligently and to automate processes related to the chemical synthesis of possible therapeutic compounds is very exciting for chemists and biochemists. The rewards for bringing a drug to market more rapidly are huge, so naturally this is what a lot of cheminformatics works is about.

Here is a page with a commercial slant which links to some interesting discussions of the term "cheminformatics", what it means, whether or not it exists as a distinct discipline, and even whether it should be replaced by "chemoinformatics".

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