Announcing the Decoding Bio Snapshot 2023
I’m taking a quick break this week from my series on software for biotechs, to announce a project organized by the folks at Decoding Bio, and that I contributed to. The Decoding Bio Snapshot 2023 explores the questions: What are the things that make biotech today different from the biotech of even just a few years ago? What are the things that will make the biotech of the near future even better? And who are the startups that are driving these changes?
I’m particularly excited about the Infrastructure for Bio section, which explores changes related to automation and data collection. As you’ll know from reading this newsletter, I write a lot about the importance of metadata in enabling data teams to work effectively in biotech. Yes, having access to the data itself is important. But if you don’t have the biological context to interpret that data, there isn’t much you can do with it. The metadata is where you find that biological context.
So this section of the snapshot focuses on two key areas: The first is software that supports getting data and metadata from the lab to a place where data teams can use it. This is an obvious one, which I’ve written plenty about before. The second area, which is a bit less obvious, is automation. So yes, it’s obvious that automation can speed up the rate at which you can get data from the lab. But less obvious is that automation allows you to capture much more detailed and reliable metadata via logs of what the robots did. The metadata you can extract from these logs beats the data manually entered by bench scientists every time. I’ve seen this in action, and I think it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
But this is just one section of the report - Every section includes deep insights into the changing world of biotech, and interesting perspectives on what’s coming next. I’m very proud to have been involved in putting this together, and I hope you’ll check it out.