Words by Chris Mace
Images by Claudia Paiz

David B. Agus, MD, is Research Director of the Louis Warschaw Prostate Cancer Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, a gifted doctor and a leader in the field of bioinformatics, where computing has turbocharged biology and medicine.

His team focuses on the development and progression of prostate cancer and consists of people from the hard as well as the soft sciences. Much of the challenge and potential of running such an operation comes from uniting the inward facing cultures of IT, mathematics and molecular biology, partly made possible by Macs. As a research hospital, Cedars-Sinai has evolved to the point where it has two full time mathematicians. As a director in this environment, Dr. Agus might have to coordinate the efforts of biologists gathering data from a genome using "gene chip" technology with the efforts of computer scientists crunching billions of bits of data into complex algorithms.

Beyond that, the journey from research to drugs requires navigating regulatory channels, carrying out laboratory procedures and clinical trials, and balancing numerous business forces in a billion dollar industry, something he says is made possible by computers and could ultimately lead to treating cancer as a chronic disease.

In his efforts to develop drugs faster than cancers can develop resistances to them, he has chosen the Unix based OS X platform, operating on the 802.11b wireless protocol. This enables the seamless sharing of vast amounts of information from the lab to the clinic, and even the home via a UPN (user personalized network).