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{bio,medical} informatics


Tuesday, July 09, 2002

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find related articles. powered by google. Washington Business Journal Venture capital scarce for bioinformatics players

"Most agree that venture money is there for companies -- but the pressure must seem insurmountable for entrepreneurs, who probably feel like they have to give the perfect business pitch to venture capitalists just to get a foot in the door.

"If people aren't rethinking their models, they're nuts; if they were waiting for Viaken to be their wake-up call, they're nuts," Nelson says."

redux [04.18.02]
find related articles. powered by google. GenomeWeb After the Fall, DoubleTwist's Williamson Performs Stoic Postmortem

""Bioinformatics is heterogeneous, but many bioinformatics [tools] fulfill a narrow niche," said Williamson. "There is room for someone to consolidate, but I don't know if that is needed or necessary. Plus there's always an academic coming up with the next thing. So it's a hard business to sustain."

Bioinformatics "is great for smaller companies," he went on. And there are "people who can tie the islands of analysis together, and who have the resources to pull it off, but is that a business? That's the million dollar question. And will anyone buy it if you can pull it together? Everybody wants to be the Microsoft Office of bioinformatics, but I'm not sure that's going to happen.""

redux [04.10.02]
find related articles. powered by google. vnunet Gene genie promises IT boom

"Bioinformatics is the gene genie that could bring back the boom years for IT."

"Bioinformatics is inherently different to the dotcoms because it is based on real rather than perceived needs," she said. "We will need cancer drugs, Aids drugs and more food, so the business projection is much more stable."

redux [03.12.02]
find related articles. powered by google. EyeForPharma Bio-IT sector gains momentum despite recession according to new research from IDC

"While other IT sectors are struggling to keep their heads above water, the Bio-IT sector is gaining rapid momentum, according to analysis from IDC's new research and advisory service, Bio-IT Infrastructure. In addition, the research suggests the Bio-IT market will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24% to nearly $38 billion by 2006."

redux [12.05.01]
find related articles. powered by google. News.Com IT firms bet on biotech to lift high-end sales

"The world's largest computer makers, faced with sagging consumer demand, are betting that the huge data crunching needs of nascent biotechnology firms will grow into a multi-billion dollar market for their equipment and consulting services over the next decade."

""The average individual can't comprehend what has happened in the last half dozen years, where the two greatest medical discoveries, the genome and the microchip, have converged," said Cal Stiller, chief executive of the $250 million Canadian Medical Discoveries Fund."

"We need companies that are on the informatics side that say 'holy cow', we have just stumbled onto the mother lode! We know nothing about mining that area, but we can build the best drilling equipment out there," added Stiller."

redux [03.11.02]
find related articles. powered by google. The Boston Globe No boom yet in analysis of drug data

"The emerging field of bioinformatics, the use of computers to analyze the inner workings of biology, is transforming an industry that just a decade ago relied on the manual labor of chemists and biologists. But even as it does so, bioinformatics is floundering as a business.

Shares of public companies that sell biological data or software are trading at a fraction of what they did two years ago. Dozens of companies have crowded into the field. Some have folded; others have survived only by morphing into drug-discovery companies.

''It's a hard market to build a business around,'' said Oliver Fetzer, a vice president at Boston Consulting Group."

redux [02.11.02]
find related articles. powered by google. MSNBC The Gene Bubble

"LIKE EVERY BUBBLE, this one had to burst. Stock prices of many bioinformatics firms have fallen sharply in recent years. LION Biosciences of Germany went public at $40 a share and now trades at about $13. Iceland's DeCode is worth a fourth of its former high. Even Celera, the U.S. firm that helped decode the human genome, is off its peak.

Falling stock prices are a symptom of a greater disappointment in bioinformatics. A few years ago the laborious and quirky process of drug discovery seemed on the verge of giving way to new streamlined, data-driven methods. Some firms organized the blizzard of genetic data into databases that researchers could mine with search engines from still other firms. Software companies built computer programs that modeled what goes on in human cells and even whole organs. Many investors came to believe that bioinformatics would open a new avenue to the discovery of drugs. But this avenue simply hasn't materialized. Says biotech analyst Earling Refsum at Nomura Bank in London: "Bioinformatics has not helped Big Pharma get more drugs into the pipeline.""

redux [01.03.02]
find related articles. powered by google. WashTech.Com Low Fliers Behind the Drugs

"Inside the laboratories of the world's major pharmaceutical companies and biotechnology start-ups, an emerging science is quietly transforming the drug industry. Bioinformatics -- the use of computers to analyze the inner workings of biology -- is helping researchers pinpoint the roots of diseases and design sophisticated medicines to treat them.

But even as it becomes a vital part of drug research, bioinformatics as a business is losing favor with investors. Shares of publicly traded firms that sell biological data and software tools are slumping, and venture capitalists are increasingly wary of investing in such companies.

redux [12.18.01]
find related articles. powered by google. Signals Magazine Bioinformatics: Time to Morph

"There comes a point in the life cycle of every organism when it must change or perish. For bioinformatics, the time for metamorphosis is now. Though computational biology is already an intrinsic part of the drug discovery process, the business models adopted by most bioinformatics firms have failed to produce profits. Competition -- from the IT industry and big pharma itself -- is growing and investors, both public and private, are unimpressed. While some companies are hoping persistence pays off, many are pursuing new business models that should allow them to retain a bigger share of the profits they are helping to create."

redux [03.14.01]
find related articles. powered by google. ABCNews.Com The Next Bubble: Is Bioinformatics the Next Big Boom...and Bust?

"The story proclaimed in its lead, "Move over Information Age. Make room for the age of bioinformation." You could picture bleary eyes opening all over the Bay Area. The story went on to note that a San Jose consulting firm was predicting a 10 percent annual growth in the bioinformatics market for years to come; and that the National Science Foundation estimated that 20,000 new jobs in the field would be created in the field in just the next four years.

If that wasn't enough, the rest of the section was filled with page after page of biotech firms listing job openings - in powerful juxtaposition to the endless lists of dot-com layoffs just a few pages earlier. Picture Starbucks spit-takes from Marin to Santa Cruz.

Wow! Rewrite that resume to emphasize that biology course you took in college. Roll your Aeron chair down to the nearest lab. Trade that black turtleneck for a white lab coat..."



[ 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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