With collaborations and new products from IT companies enabling life sciences firms to quantify available information, bioinformatics is witnessing exciting changes. With the growing vaccines and biologics markets, bioinformatics has become a key investment area for research firms.
Leaders like TCS and Cognizant have moved in, developing customised software for pharmaceuticals, biomedical and biotechnology companies, analysing the results of biological experiments in genomics and proteomics and predicting gene functions. TCS is working with the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics while Cognizant has teamed up with Pistoia Alliance, an alliance of life sciences companies and vendors.
?Technologies that facilitate data generation in biology have undergone a tremendous change. Several million data points/genomes are generated every day in a few hours. Next-generation sequencing technology has revolutionised the creation of entire genome sequences. The cost of generating sequences is falling so fast that the cost of data storage may soon become more expensive than data generation. These are key drivers for drug discovery moving towards the cloud,? says J Sairamkumar, vice-president, life sciences practice, Cognizant.
Adds Peter Sheppard, assistant vice-president, life sciences practice, Cognizant: ?Drug discovery has several valuable data sources/applications that are in the public domain. Companies are sensitive to scientists using these sources because of security challenges, which could lead to IP loss. This has resulted in pharma/biotech companies investing in internal infrastructure and creating a mirror of the sites. The initiatives result in huge infrastructure, application and content costs.?
According to Dipta Chaudhury, senior consultant, South Asia and Middle East, pharma and biotech practice, Frost & Sullivan, one of the key drivers for investment in bioinformatics is the need for highly advanced data management tools. India?s focus on funding and research has enabled smaller companies investing in research to grow, and these companies are the key buyers of new systems which would enable them to integrate their research services.
Contract research firms need faster research and drug development methods, and bioinformatics software enable them to do time-consuming jobs like protein structure comparison, RNA modelling, gene expression analysis, gene clustering and pathway analysis.
Key challenges include the lack of standards, making it difficult to arrive at an industry-norm that will enable companies to seamlessly and easily integrate their information when required. There is a dearth of software that can intelligently interpret the data for human understanding.
India and China are growing fastest and are expected to continue this momentum. Over time, consolidation might follow, with larger players offering data interpretation, says Chaudhury.
Global industry analysts says biotechnology in India accounts for about 2% in the global industry. It ranks among the leading 12 biotech industries globally and is the third largest in Asia. The Indian biotech industry has good potential for growth, given its skills, knowledge, cost-effectiveness and infrastructure facilities. The Indian biotech industry crossed the $3-billion mark in 2010, witnessing a 23% annual growth, says an India Brand Equity Foundation report. It is poised to touch $11.6 billion by 2017.
Anuradha Acharya, CEO, Ocimum Biosolutions, points to the need for smarter bioinformatics methods. ?Large companies have moved from generic drug discovery process to specialised and personalised medicine. Many tout this to be the decade of the niche busters, she adds. The market for personalised medicine is estimated at $4-12 billion and could grow 10-fold to over $100 billion by 2015. ?The challenge is more complex than before as companies are evaluating ideas on how to reuse their past clinical data in association with genomics data. Data from improved sequencing need more powerful computing power and elastic storage,? she explains.
With greater requirement for computing power, cloud-based tools and software are in demand. Most of the research has become collaborative. The data generated is at least 100 times more than earlier, demanding better storage and computing power, she adds. Integration of knowledge areas in the discovery stage is another area where IT companies will play a major role.
Ocimum has built tools for sequencing, gene expression, laboratory information management system, biomarker discovery, toxicological studies and many custom solutions. The integration of genomics, pharmacogenomics, clinical systems, epidemiology, and disease surveillance system in drug discovery process has increased the demand for smart systems and, therefore, there is need for more robust and smarter IT systems.