What role do information technology companies play in the continued development of biotech?
As the industry moves from wet biology (where the work is done with wet labs) to digital biology, it changes the nature of the players. We’re now going into biotechnology companies and where they used to have lab environments, now they’re largely on computers because it’s all bioinformatics. The problems [the industry] has are things like moving large data sets and extracting data and data mining. So where are the skill sets in data mining and so forth? In IBM, in Microsoft, in Oracle, etc. Q: Do the IT companies lead the way in biotech? A: It’s still biology. You’re using informatics to drive it, but the biology world is way ahead [in understanding how to apply technology]. Five to 10 years from now, that will be different. Q: How much of a problem is it that biotech companies basically need to build systems from scratch? A: I liken where we are to the early days of computing. Once standards developed around Intel and Windows, computing became ubiquitous. Right now in biology, there a
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