Scaling Biotech 2023 Wrap-up
I’m going to skip the newsletter next week since it’s when most folks take their holiday vacation, which means this is the last post of the year. In my wrap up last year, I wrote that I wanted to continue shifting this newsletter towards more concrete problems and practical solutions. And while I think I’ve managed to focus in on much more concrete problems this year, I still seem to mostly write about how hard the problems are instead of giving practical solutions. However, I’m starting to think that’s OK. And this week I want to explain why. But to get there, we need to start with Bits in Bio.
Bits in Bio is a community of data/software folks (Bits) working in biotech (Bio) centered around a Slack channel, but with other components including in-person events around the world. If you haven’t signed up yet, you should. Or if you signed up but haven’t visited the Slack in a while, you should do that too. I’ve been fortunate to be involved since the early days, recently on the steering committee with Shaq Vayda and BiB’s founder, Nicholas Laurus-Stone. Nicholas and Shaq have done a ton of work to grow the community, along with the city captains who organize the local events. (If you’ve been to one of these, you should reach out to your city captain(s) and say thanks.)
On the steering committee, we’ve had many discussions about how BiB can best serve the community of its members. This usually involves trying to understand who the community is, and how we might compare to other, ostensibly similar, organizations such as the membership of Bio-IT World. Here’s what I think (which will bring us back to problems over solutions):
In some sense, there’s nothing new about data/software in biotech. It was a thing when they started the human genome project in 1990, and you could trace it back even earlier in one form or another. So Bits in Bio wasn’t motivated by a sudden shift in the core technology because there hasn’t been a technological shift as much as an evolution.
Instead, I think Bits in Bio is a reaction to a sudden cultural shift. Up until the last 5-10 years, most of the work on data/software in biology was in support of ideas that came from within the biology community, and mostly done by folks who came from an IT/Informatics background. So the culture, the team dynamics and the mindsets took on the flavor of traditional IT solving technical problems and otherwise taking a back seat. Hence the name Bio IT.
In the last 5-10 years, we’ve seen a sudden influx of ideas from outside biology, particularly around machine learning and data science. From a technical perspective, you could argue that this isn’t fundamentally different from bio statistics. (You might also argue that it IS fundamentally different, but I don’t think it matters either way.) The point is that these external ideas come packaged in the brains of people who either aren’t biologists, or who have spent enough time working outside biology - say in Tech companies - to bring in different ideas about culture, team dynamics and (perhaps most importantly) how tech should fit in with the science.
In particular, these folks want to be deeply involved in the technical aspects while also taking a front seat in the science. This is not how IT operates and up until a few years ago it wasn’t how biotech operated either.
The interesting thing is that this cultural shift has actually created new technical problems that fall outside the technical evolution I mentioned above. Want to store the whole genomes of a million people? Any of the top three Cloud providers will have you covered. Want to capture plate maps for weekly experiments in a consistent format? Lol, good luck.
I believe that the community that has formed around BiB was a response to both this cultural shift and the new set of technical problems that it produced. A community that has been around as long as Bio-IT has been wrestling with their particular set of problems long enough to have come up with well established solutions. We in Bits in Bio, on the other hand, are still trying to figure out what the problems are.
So for me, the most important thing that Bits in Bio can do is to provide a place where the community can discuss these problems and share whatever pieces of solutions they can. And similarly, when I write about problems without solutions on Scaling Biotech, I hope that I can at least help you, Dear Reader, to better understand the problems that you’re facing. I will, of course, still share solutions when I have them. (And occasionally plug the solutions I offer through Merelogic.) But some weeks are going to be just problems.
I want to thank everyone who has subscribed, forwarded posts, clicked the like button or written a comment. We’re past 700 subscribers now, which is way more than I ever expected. If you keep reading, I’ll keep writing. See you in 2024!