Brave New IT WorldLife sciences computing is one antidote for an ailing industryClaudia Willen Recent fast-moving developments in the life sciences world presage even stronger demand for IT products and services than analysts observed in 2001. For example, in late November 2001, scientists at Advanced Cell Technology Inc. in Worcester, Mass. announced that they had cloned human embryonic cells, once again inflaming debate about the best uses for human genetic material in medical research. After the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks and subsequent anthrax contamination scares, high-profile concerns about bioterrorism and chemical and biological warfare refocused the global scientific community's efforts on detection, prevention, and treatment of infectious diseases and the effects of biochemical weapons, such as anthrax, smallpox, and nerve gas. Funding for biotechnology and life sciences R&D has vacillated wildly since the industry emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Venture capitalists, government agencies, and, more recently, IPOs are major sources of financial support. Pharmaceutical giants, medical organizations, academic institutions, and the companies that supply these industries with products and services have gained ground and are generating massive amounts of data. Collecting, managing, analyzing, integrating, and presenting this data have been the initial factors driving growth of the life sciences IT industry, soon to be followed by other IT application areas as the industry evolves. International Data Corp. (IDC) estimates that IT spending for the life sciences market will increase from $4 billion in 2001 to more than $11 billion in 2004. ACCELERATING ACTIVITYLife sciences IT seems to be on everyone's radar these days. Oracle hosted a Life Sciences Day with Compaq Computer Corp. at Oracle OpenWorld in December 2001. The event featured biotech luminaries such as Craig Venter, president and chief scientific officer (CSO) of Applera Corp.'s Celera Genomics Group, the first organization to announce that it had sequenced the entire human genome in June 2000. (Having a complete genetic sequence for humans will accelerate R&D efforts in many areas, including the medical and pharmaceutical industries.) Close on the heels of OpenWorld will be the first BioIT World conference series (scheduled for March in Boston and August in San Francisco) with keynote speakers such as Roy Dunbar, Eli Lilly & Co.'s CIO. Scientific American is sponsoring the Second Annual BioSilico 2002 Bioinformatics & Genomics conference in February, where CSOs, pharmaceutical CTOs, and high-performance computing (HPC) executives from companies such as Compaq, IBM, and Oracle will compare notes on technology developments and opportunities. Longtime IT publisher O'Reilly & Associates Inc. has also jumped on board with the first O'Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference covering the emerging bioinformatics field, which uses HPC tools and algorithms to mine information from biological and health data. INDUSTRY HEALTHIDC's April 10, 2001 IT Forecaster newsletter recommended that IT vendors look into the life sciences market as other sectors weakened. Hardware, storage, services, and software are IDC's principal biocomputing market sectors. Life sciences software needs run the gamut from knowledge management and database systems to specialized applications for informatics, sequencing, proteomics (protein research), computational chemistry, and data visualization, according to IDC. To that list you can add business intelligence, portals, CRM, supply chain management, and enterprise application integration just for starters. IDC pointed to IT infrastructure spending for a single biotechnology organization, Celera Genomics, to illustrate the life sciences IT market potential. Celera had 70TB of databases in April, increasing at a rate of 15 to 20GB per day and used 1.7 TeraFLOPS of processing power on 900 Compaq AlphaServers and six massively parallel processor (MPP)-based Paracel GeneMatchers. That's just for one organization, not even one of the global pharmaceutical titans. Biocomputational requirements have already overtaken other scientific disciplines, including weather forecasting and nuclear weapons research, according to IDC. In an Oct. 2001 Ernst & Young (E&Y) LLP report, "Focus on Fundamentals: The Biotechnology Report," Scott Morrison, E&Y's national director of life sciences, concluded that biotech companies are in the best financial shape of their 25-year history with strong capital reserves and R&D investments and are far more stable than dot-coms. The study found that biotech firms raised $33 billion in 2000, but that these companies now must invest their capital in aggressive product development efforts to retain investor confidence. IT CROSSOVEREnterprise vendors are accelerating their expansion into life sciences IT and the healthcare field. Compaq, EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Plumtree Software Inc., Siebel Systems Inc., and Sun Microsystems are among the companies providing hardware, software, and services to biotech and pharmaceutical companies. IT vendors are also finding increasing business in the healthcare IT field. Oracle's pharmaceutical customers use a range of solutions, including Oracle Business Intelligence, CRM, ERP, Financials, and Oracle's specialized applications, such as Oracle Clinical. For instance, Novo Nordisk uses Oracle Clinical to share and standardize clinical trials data usage and reporting globally in an effort to expedite the multinational regulatory drug approval process. Plumtree has implemented portals for pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and medical equipment marketplaces, including the global myELVIS portal for Eli Lilly's 30,000 employees. EMC markets storage systems to pharmaceutical and bioinformatics companies responsible for processing and storing the huge amounts of genetic data needed to develop effective medications. Gene Logic Inc. is one of EMC's newer customers. "Information and the ability to rapidly access it are key elements of pharmaceutical and biotechnology drug discovery and development," said Gene Logic's CIO Victor M. Markowitz. Life sciences computing research has also been a good candidate for government funding. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded millions of dollars to national labs and universities to develop regional or global distributed computing grids to handle huge scientific data analysis projects, especially for the life sciences. HP, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun are all getting involved in grid computing R&D. The NSF gave IBM $53 million in 2001 to build a domestic grid and IBM is also working on additional U.S. and U.K. grids. POTENTIAL OBSTACLESDespite all the resources lavished on the life sciences IT industry and the incredible promise of this sector, companies may encounter considerable barriers to success. Long R&D cycles, data integration issues, and privacy protection are major issues facing the life sciences computing industry. Profitability can elude pharmaceutical and biotech companies for years as they sink more and more dollars into research projects, some of which lead to dead ends. Long R&D cycles have caused fluctuations in the biotech industry's fortunes in the past. Even after identifying promising research areas, screening thousands of compounds, and analyzing boatloads of genetic data, the drug development process can get completely stalled in the clinical trials phase, a complex process to test whether medications are safe for humans, as required by the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approval of new drugs. Keeping track of all the clinical trials data, participants, and required documents has fueled an entire subset of the life sciences IT industry. Data integration and protecting patient privacy have also emerged as key life sciences computing issues. While biotech and pharmaceutical companies generally have very advanced IT systems and data management practices, they also need patient and medical data from hospitals, government agencies, HMOs, and other organizations often plagued by legacy systems and disparate databases and software. When patient data is involved, privacy becomes a very important issue that has yet to be sorted out. The U.S. government enacted the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) Act of 1996, which mandates standards for healthcare providers, hospitals, and HMOs in areas such as data exchange, privacy protection, and security. Although helping organizations meet HIPAA requirements could provide opportunities, life sciences IT vendors should also be aware of how HIPAA and other regulations will affect their own products, services, and customers. Claudia Willen [cwillen@cmp.com] is Intelligent Enterprise's communities editor. RESOURCESBioIT World 2002: www.bioitworld.com Ernst & Young Health Sciences: www.ey.com/industry/health O'Reilly Bioinformatics Conference: conferences.oreilly.com/biocon Scientific American BioSilico 2002: www.bioedge.net |
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