Contributor Vivek Kemp is GE’s Reporter at Large

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the Biosciences Technology Organization at GE Global Research. The team is redefining what’s possible in healthcare, by discovering how diseases develop at their earliest stages in order to develop medical equipment, specialized diagnostic processes and gene sequencing.

Admittedly, GE is known more for its expertise on the circuitry of machines than the circuitry of the human body. But in 2004, when the company acquired a British biotech firm, Amersham, GE also became a force in all things vascular, cellular and microscopic.

Biology and engineering are extensions of each other, explained Christoph Hergersberg, the Global Technology Leader for Biosciences.

“The better we understand the cosmos of the human body, the better we can tailor equipment, processes and drugs,” he said.

In less than a decade, the 60-person strong group has entered into multiple partnerships, ranging from pharmaceuticals to diet and nutrition.

GE and Eli Lilly teamed to figure out how to predict a cancer patient’s response to therapies.

In hopes to understand the root causes of type II diabetes, the bio-organization also joined with the Nestlé Research Center, using GE’s imaging capabilities to measure body composition combined with Nestlé’s expertise in metabonomics.

I had a chance to speak with a couple of the biologists about the future of the organization, the impact it has already made and why it’s important that GE focuses as much on man as it does on machine.



Christoph Hergersberg, Global Technology Leader for Biosciences, was formerly with Amersham. Sitting in one of the bio-labs in upstate New York, he gives an overview of the Biosciences Technology Organization and how a single cell can help cure, treat and diagnose cancer.




Fiona Ginty, a bioinformatics scientist, works on nutritional studies with Nestlé. She also leads the molecular pathology program, which involves taking multiple pictures of cancer cells, discovering their inner depths. In this video, Ginty talks about the hidden information packed into cancer cells, which until now has been invisible, and how the bio-lab is helping to change the way we see disease.

* Read the announcement
* Read “GE targets eco hospitals; composites in Europe”
* Read “GE’s software helps Shanghai breathe easier”
* Read GE Reports’ coverage of the healthymagination launch