Biotech in Australia: life and science
The life sciences industry is being propelled by information technology, according to Tony Palanca, Life Sciences manager for IBM Australia.
"The reason is that with the mapping of the genome, there's really been an explosion of data for people in the life sciences industry to manage," Palanca said. (Cambridge Dictionary describes genome as the complete set of genetic material of a human, animal, plant or other living thing.)
"So to give you some examples--at the university research level, people are now not only viewing whole organisms, they're dealing with people's genetic sequences as well," said Palanca. "As humans turn in tens of thousands of DNA sequences and literally millions of protein interactions, so [we've seen] just in the last few years, the amount of data that people in research have had to deal with has exploded."
An example of this is "personalised medicine"--where individuals can be genetically screened to see whether particular drugs will be effective in combating a particular condition, or whether the drugs will have adverse side effects.
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For IBM, the demand for more and more powerful IT solutions from the life sciences industry has actually directed the development of its latest computer chips. "At our research labs in New York, they're working on a project called blue gene, which is an attempt to simulate protein folding," he said. "That project will build the world's largest supercomputer, and from a research perspective, it is really beginning to drive the development of new chipsets that are coming out in the future Power4 range."
"In a very real sense, life sciences is now driving the development of high performance computing in IBM, and a lot of the things we learn in that research is applied in real world scenarios to the life sciences customers we serve," he added.
New revenue stream?
As exciting as news of BioIT spending is to the IT industry in general, how does that help a specific company out in the trenches?
The life sciences sector has fairly unique demands created by its obsessive need to generate huge amounts of data and then try to make sense of it.
"The major challenge facing most life sciences organisations is how to deal effectively with the massive amounts of data," said Palanca. "In one way or another, it always comes back to: there's lots of data, it's in lots of different places, how do you process it quickly, how do you generate meaning and intellectual property out of the data that exists."
In order to turn data into information and get value out of it, you need fast computers, a good database, good data integration tools, and good techniques for putting queries into that data, according to Palanca. However, he warned there are some problems in dealing with the life sciences industry that need to be taken into account.
"It is a very dynamic industry, and it's changing very rapidly," he said. "I think one of the real challenges for all IT providers is keeping up with the changes that really are being--to a large degree--driven by the dramatic breakthroughs that are happening at a research level. There would literally be a major breakthrough every day in this industry that have implications for many that inhabit it."
"A few years ago, the area of proteomics was very small and not considered very significant, and in four years, proteomics has really changed the way a lot of science is being done. There's the potential to change the drug discovery process, and it's an area that generates enormous amounts of data," said Palanca.
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"With every one of these changes there is a further explosion of data--more to integrate, more connections between different branches of the science," he said. "And if you just imagine this very steep curve of data and complexity getting steeper and steeper with every new breakthrough ... that is a challenge that is stretching the capabilities of a lot of the underlying hardware and software technologies that exist today."
It seems that if you have a solution to these problems--or even a partial solution to one of these problems--there's a ready market for your wares. And of course, you're not restricted to the Australian market (which is just as well, really).
"The computational technology which companies use to develop drugs or to do scientific research are the same in the rest of the world," said Martin Hilgeman, who hails from Europe and is a science expert for hardware supplier SGI. His colleague Michael Armitage, director of science for SGI Australia/New Zealand, pointed to the recent Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology conference in Brisbane, and the fact that there were attendees from all over the world.
"Australian science is no different from science in other parts of the world," Armitage said.
Australian companies have a helping hand when it comes to exporting, according to Emphron Informatics' Thomas. "Austrade runs a very good system for new exporters and has all the relevant information--from mentoring to support--on its Web site. It's a class act [the Austrade set up]," he said.
Market research firm Datamonitor advises companies that wish to exploit the opportunities provided by the life sciences industry to have the following attributes:
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Life and science |
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