On today’s podcast, Cofactor Genomics COO, Dr. David Messina, discusses how his company is working to make personalized medicine a reality by focusing on the potential of RNA as a diagnostic tool.

Unlike DNA, which is set in stone at birth, our RNA changes on a minute-by-minute basis and acts as a barometer of our health.

Led by 3 former researchers from The Human Genome Project, Cofactor Genomics is developing a patent-pending RNA-based technology that will allow medical researchers to detect specific RNA molecular markers in even small, low-quality tissue samples. This will make 100 times more patient specimens available for analysis and will open the door to massive, Big Data-style databases for use in both drug and treatment development.

Carter Williams: So, David, the way we normally do this, is we sort of walk through background.

David Messina: Great.

CW: Sort of just, you know ... Cofactor is doing some really exciting things and so we'll spend some time talking about that, but I also love technology and try and understand what's happening next, I think. In iSelect, we have this opportunity to see cool emerging technology, and when I tell other people, that's ... No, idea, what's ... And, so it's normal stuff for us -

DM: Right, but, not everybody knows what's going on.

CW: Not everyone knows what's going on and it sort of gives them some excitement, so ... But, I'm really intrigued about you're now at Cofactor, right? Part of the founding team. And, I'm sort of intrigued about how you got here, so, how did you become a computational biologist?

DM: You know, I never expected to be, actually, I ... When I went into college, I was thinking I would do international law, or maybe political science, and after trying to do that for a couple of years, I realized it wasn't for me, and I switched gears completely.

And, I was really looking for something 180 degrees different. And I ended up thinking about biology, and I had the opportunity to work with a very talented guy at Argon National Laboratory, a national laboratory just outside of Chicago, who is a mathematician and a computer scientist, originally, and he had met Carl Woese who, kind of one of the pioneers of computational biology.

In 1977, he, Carl Woese, had discovered, or postulated, that there is an entire third domain of life called the Archaea. And, so, you have to think about eukaryotes being multicellular organisms, prokaryotes being bacteria, and he was saying that there's actually a whole third domain that's kind of similar, some parts that are multicellular, some parts that are like single-celled organisms.

He predicted this using ... looking at RNA molecules, the very early sequencing, that was available at that time. And he looked at enough of them to be able to figure out that there was, in fact, this whole third branch of life. Nobody believed him for a long time. And, it turned out to be true. And, now we know this. This is accepted many years later.

So, Ross Overbeek met Carl and became enamored of applying computational techniques to biology. So, when I met Ross, this was just after a team had published the first free-living ... The genome of the first ... The first genome sequence of a free-living organism. So, Methanococcus jannaschii, this was done by Craig Venter's group.

CW: What year was this?

DM: This would have been 1996.

CW: Okay.

DM: And, so, Ross was a unique individual, in that, even at that time, this is when we have one genome ... He started thinking about, and we talked about, "Well,