The commercialization of
bioinformatics
Phillip B.C. Jones
Senior Patent Attorney, Patent Department
ZymoGenetics Inc., 1201 Eastlake Ave., East, Seattle, WA 98102
Phone: (206) 442-6681
Fax (206) 442-6678
E-mail:pbcj@wolfenet.com
Keywords:
Computational biology, Nucleotide sequences, Pharmaceuticals.
Biological
research has experienced a paradigm shift from in vivo or in vitro
experimentation to in silico experimentation, a development that relies
upon bioinformatics. The beginning of bioinformatics stems from the fortuitous
timing of the adoption of new DNA sequencing methods and the availability
of mini-and bench-top computers, which became the tools to store and to analyze
the sequence data. Another fortunate coincidence was the popularization of
the Internet, which provided a means to exchange sequence data and sequence
analysis software, and the establishment of the Human Genome Project, which
stimulated the need for sophisticated data management and analysis tools.
Market pull
has rapidly stimulated bioinformatics commercialization as pharmaceutical
companies discovered a potential means to cure their innovation deficit.
One of the early models for commercializing bioinformatics was simply to
sell access to databases of human nucleotide sequences. This strategy is
heading toward obsolescence as the public consortium nears its goal of sequencing
the human genome. The
key to future commercialization of sequence data will be to develop informatics
technology that transforms this data into information that is useful for
diagnosis and therapy. A competitive transformation of sequence data into
information will require improvements in data integration and data mining.
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