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{bio,medical} informatics

Monday, January 28, 2002

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The Washington Post Celera Changed, Venter Couldn't

"As all that was happening, people who know him say, White, Venter's boss, was getting grumpy. He well knew that Celera, under its original business plan, could not deliver long-range earnings growth that would justify what the market was paying for Celera shares. One top genetic scientist said White snapped to him in the midst of the publicity barrage, "'This is all nice, but we need a business plan.'"

They quickly came to the same conclusion as many minds before them: In biology and medicine, the only business plan that offers the potential of extraordinary profits is drug development. All the biotechnology superstars have been companies with hit drugs."

redux [01.22.01]
BBC News Genome pioneer steps down
"Dr Craig Venter, the US scientist who led the private effort to decode the human genome, has quit as boss of his company Celera Genomics."

""We are now at a critical juncture where my best contributions can be made in a scientific advisory role, allowing the rest of the organisation to continue Celera's progress toward becoming a successful pharmaceutical business.""

GenomeWeb How Should Celera Replace J. Craig? Very Carefully
"More and more of what Celera did reflected its ongoing metamorphosis, and in a candid assessment of his best-known business, White conceded that "information will never be a multibillion dollar industry."

"The goal was always to become a user of our [own] data. Celera is in the transformation stage," he proclaimed, and not for the first time. "We have to get busy to retool to become a credible drug-discovery company." After all, that, they say, is where the real money is."

redux [06.09.00]
Forbes Celera's Worth Still Up In The Air
"Great discoveries do not necessarily make great businesses. Businesses have to sell something. Celera Genomics doesn't sell or make anything tangible. It hawks service and information. It sells access to lists of genes and computers that can sort through those messy lists. Samuel Broder, the company's executive vice president and chief medical officer, makes Celera sound like some kind of consulting company, or perhaps a library."

"Venter's quest could be a fable, with all sorts of morals about the power of capitalism and the importance of a single, brilliant, willful individual who used the market to shake the ivory towers of science. But those morals only hold if Celera succeeds, if business and science blend to propel the company into the future with breathtaking speed without rocketing it into the realities of the marketplace. Celera could become one of the great business success stories. It could also be a financial train wreck."

Right now, that makes it a very volatile stock."

redux [07.17.00]
BBC News Celera plans next step
"Craig Venter, head of Celera Genomics which last month completed the map of the human genome, has outlined his next goal.

Speaking at a conference he said his new task was to map the proteins which drive all chemical reactions in the body."

""A big part of the business is the straightforward providing of information, but I'm not complacent just to do that," Venter said."

[ rhetoric ]

“Bioinformatics will be at the core of biology in the 21st century. In fields ranging from structural biology to genomics to biomedical imaging, ready access to data and analytical tools are fundamentally changing the way investigators in the life sciences conduct research and approach problems. Complex, computationally intensive biological problems are now being addressed and promise to significantly advance our understanding of biology and medicine. No biological discipline will be unaffected by these technological breakthroughs.”

BIOINFORMATICS IN THE 21st CENTURY

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