Biotech, the next emerging market for the IT industry

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Biotechnology as an industry is developing into a huge market for the global IT industry as IT infrastructure and security is becoming indispensable for the sector. The challenges and opportunities in bridging the IT - BT divide was discussed at a session - "IT in Biotechnology - New Solutions for Life Sciences," today at Bangalore Bio 2008.

 

The session was moderated by Ms. Anuradha Acharya - Founder & CEO, Ocimum Biosolutions. The participants were Dr. Akhilesh Pandey - Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA and Founder, Institute of Bioinformatics, Dr. Chellappa Gopalakrishnan - Chief Bio Informatics Officer, Avesthagen Limited, Mr. Kuldeep Singh - Technology Account Manager, Sun Microsystems, Mr. Sanjeev Kumar - CEO & MD, BIOCOS and Dr. Rajgopal Srinivasan - Head Bio - IT, TCS Innovations Labs and Mr. Freek Varossieau - Manager - Asia, Agilent Lab Informatics.

 

Dr. Chellappa Gopalakrishnan - Chief Bio Informatics Officer, Avesthagen Limited, Said "The problems in BT are unique and are different from other business verticals of IT. We faced a challenge of establishing a central repository for prediction and report generation which requires crunching 50 Terra Bytes of data, which was resolved by Sun Microsystems."

 

Dr. Rajgopal Srinivasan, Head Bio - IT, TCS Innovation Labs said, "IT will give greater degree of control on the exercises of Biotechnology industry. The industry needs computers to churn huge integration of data. We together need to do a lot more." He also said "The days are not far off to buy the whole genome sequence of an individual at the price of a motorcycle."

 

Dr. Akhilesh Pandey, Founder, Institute of Bioinformatics said, "IT can be truly helpful to the Biotechnology industry with integrated tools and platforms which will make available large, validated datasets, which can also be shared easily. There also exists a physical impossibility of collating all past research findings."

 

The general censuses of the discussion were that Bio-technology is a big opportunity for IT companies to explore and capitalise. And the needs are ever increasing. 

 

Sourced From: Equator Communications