Bio::Blogs #9
March 31, 2007
Pedro has the call for submissions up on his site. You have until tomorrow to submit articles. I think Pedro is going to do some snooping this month and a feeling that the editorial will be quite interesting.
Technorati Tags: Bio::Blogs, Blog Carnival, Bioinformatics
Microsoft, Google and healthcare
March 30, 2007
Over the years, many information services companies, notably IBM and SAIC have been actively involved in working with the pharmaceutical industry in trying to develop IT solutions to improve business processes and develop the infrastructure for improved data handling in clinical trials, drug discovery, etc. Of course, much of the hardware that provides the computing resources for in silico drug development also comes from the IBMs and HPs of the world. Many of the services being provided include the development of knowledge management solutions for drug discovery and clinical trials.
In recent years some other companies, not historically involved in the healthcare/drug development business, have become actively involved in the field. To an extent this is a natural evolution of a world where knowledge sharing and knowledge mining are driving the development of the information technology industry. And it is for this reason that the future of healthcare information technology may not belong to IBM, but rather to Google, or even Microsoft.
Adam Bosworth has been mentioned in these parts before, and based on a recent post on the official Google blog, the company is very serious about providing solutions for healthcare, notably the ability to search all the health-related information that is out there. One of the questions on Adam’s (and everyone else’s) mind is quality. Search is fine, but quality search in healthcare is essential. Google wants to organize the world’s information. With healthcare, they are facing a tough challenge, one with a social ticket attached to it. I am sure no one at Google wants someone to take the wrong medical decision based on incorrect information that they derived from Google.
Microsoft has probably been the more overtly aggressive company when it comes to healthcare. The BioIT Alliance, which includes a number of biosoftware/bioinformatics/service companies was a start, with goals ranging from the development of information exchange standards to more ambitious goals in biomarker discovery. A recent article in Bioinform (sub reqd) indicates that Microsoft wants to tread into IBM territory as well, by encouraging developers to adopt the Windows CCS platform to develop healthcare and other scientific applications. It will not be trivial for Windows CCS to find wide adoption in the research space (where Linux rules), but in the healthcare industry and hospital environment, the company might find more takers. However, it is more recent activities from Redmond that make their efforts more interesting, and bring them in direct competition with that old nemesis, Google. Read/WriteWeb reported earlier that Microsoft had acquired Medstory, a vertical search engine for health information. The rise of vertical search and its role in healthcare is a subject for another day, but it is clear that Microsoft wants to be a player in this space, and since Google does not have a formal offering in place, the timing is good (Is it a coincidence that the Bosworth piece followed the Microsoft news?). The article also points out, via Mary Jo Foley, that Microsoft’s Health Strategy group is developing solutions as part of the Windows Live family. Add this to their acquisition of Azyxxi, a health intelligence vendor and it is quite clear that Microsoft is very serious about the space.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully one of these days I will complete a long intended post on healthcare startups and the search space in general.
Further reading:
Semantic web and pharma
Biology, search and Udell
BioIT needs to reinvent itself
Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Google, Healthcare, Search
Things I noticed #22
March 25, 2007
Things I noticed is back. Hopefully between this series, the podcast and regular blogging, most of the relevant stuff that catches my eye will get covered.
HHS and personalized medicine
The first thing I want to talk about today is the news that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is making a concerted thrust in the area of “personalized medicine”. In addition to the funding plans, the part that caught my eye was the plan to develop a “network of networks that pulls together health care information from the nations major health data repositories to enable researchers to match treatments and outcomes.” For more see the HHS personalized healthcare website
… meanwhile cancer funding is in dire straits
While I laud the HHS for the increased attention to personalized medine, NCI grants have apparently declined 25-29%, which is a very sad state of affairs.
BIND bought
I read this first at Pedro’s place. Unleashed didn’t last as an independent entity that long
SaaS and Amazon’s web services
Inside HPC, a blog that I have started following recently has a post on rPath, a company that helps others build services on top of Amazon Web Services. Any time you can start developing an ecosystem around a platform, it bodes well. Still early days, but this is encouraging and I hope more companies start adopting AWS.
John Backus RIP
Fortran was my life many years ago, when I used to write code for molecular orbital calculations. As covered in many places, John Backus, the leader of the project that developed Fortran, has passed away.
Tumblelogs
I started one, Hari has one, and so does Gina Tripani among others.
Talking of tumblelogs
Hari has a nice post on science and society in India
Technorati Tags: Tumblelogs, John Backus, BIND, HHS, Personalized Medicine, NCI
New podcast is up
March 24, 2007
Just uploaded the second bbgm podcast. Still got some process issues to iron out, especially blocking out some time and not rushing the whole thing, but it’s a lot of fun.
Islands on the web
March 22, 2007
Via Techmeme I found this short post by Dave Winer in which he quotes Peter Rip
The Web today still resembles MS-DOS more than MS-Windows. Every website is an island, an island that knows nothing about any other website. This is no different than the world before the Windows Clipboard. All 640KB of memory was available to whatever application was running. The point of integration was the User. As it is today.
This quote really hits home. With exceptions the world of biological information is exactly that, an island. The integrated web of information is a misnomer. Just because Google indexes the web doesn’t make it integrated. So how does this change? That’s why I am intrigued by the semantic web, Freebase, microformats, etc. In the software business we talk about about developing software that allows users to spend less time on setting things up and more on using the tools at their disposal. The analogy for the web, even more so for the “bio” web would be much the same. There is information all over, in vertical databases, on individual websites, but the onus of collecting that information is on the user, who ends up spending less time on data analysis. Assuming that data by itself is only a means to and end, shouldn’t we be spending more time trying to mine and interpret that data?
Where is the future? Does it have to be the semantic web? Of all the paradigms floating around today, that makes the most sense. However, the future lies with how we think and approach this issue. People generate content, in this case biological data. They also consume that information. What needs to change is how that information is aggregated. Not just via Google, but via “smart” systems that maximize the value we get from them and minimize the effort required. The context of Peter’s article might not be the one here, but some of the questions he raises are make a ton of sense
“How can we normalize information from disparate sources to make it interoperable?”
“How do we get to a lingua franca without waiting for moribund standards?”
“How can we manage the transition of legacy information and services into this world of interoperability?”
Further reading
Matthew Ingram
Inspiration in the keys of JG and TBL
Will data be our undoing?
Picture courtesy of nhan under a Creative Commons license
Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, Biology, Information, Data Integration
