A Third Alternative for Biotech ITCareers: Informatics Vendors

Computerworld - Still yearning for the dot-com days, when IT skills were not only critical but also sexy? Wishing for a time when you could come to work with a credible chance of helping to change the world every day?

Take heart. There's still at least one industry in which advanced IT is so vital that without it, companies literally can't compete. With the right combination of technology, science and luck, such firms stand to be not only competitive, but also incredibly profitable while indeed changing the world—or at least curing disease and improving the human condition.

Pretty high concept, but that's the whole point behind biotechnology, an industry that's using the recently decoded human genome as a set of instructions for how to design drugs to treat cancer, diabetes, depression and dozens of other physical and mental maladies.

"A lot of it involves straight IT skills, but in the end, what you're trying to do is pretty significant," says Paul Dupuis, who has a background in mainstream IT and a talent for understatement. He is director of IT at Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.

Gaining Ground

Leveraging IT to help read the human genome and design compounds according to its instructions could cut two to three years off the 15 it currently takes to develop a single new drug. It could also slice the average $880 million price tag for drug development in half, according to a report from The Boston Consulting Group Inc.

Do-It-Yourself Informatics Biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies will spend increasingly large amounts of money on bioinformatics during the next few years, but the bulk of their spending will continue to go toward systems and applications they build in-house. THIRD-PARTY TECHNOLOGY IN-HOUSE TECHNOLOGY 2000 $80M $750M 2001 $160M $1B 2002 $320M $1.22B 2003 $640M $1.33B 2004 $960M $1.5B 2005 $1.44B $1.57B Source: The Boston Consulting Group Inc., Boston

Advances in homegrown and commercial informatics are making the decoding process easier, but the data is growing faster than the technology used to analyze it.

"A year or two ago, we were all very focused on sequencing genes, figuring out how they assemble together into chromosomes, which 10 years ago seemed like a phenomenal project," says George Morris, director of bioinformatics at drug development firm Zycos Inc. in Lexington, Mass.