350 CATALYZING INQUIRY
As in the case of academic organizations, specific company names provided below are illustrative
and hardly exhaustive, and no inference should be drawn from the fact that any given company is not
included.
10.2.4.1 Major IT Corporations
As a fast-growing, (comparatively) well-funded, and high-profile sector, life sciences research and
business represents an irresistible target to large IT vendors. As such, companies such as HP and IBM
have both developed suites of products and services customized for the consumption of research labs as
well as the biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors. These services are not necessarily substantially
different from those that vendors provide to other sectors—a disk drive is a disk drive—but are bundled
with useful software or interfaces designed with the life sciences in mind.
IBM established its Life Sciences Business Unit in 1998, incorporating hardware, consulting ser-
vices, and an aggressive alliance program that includes many major vendors of bioinformatics and
related software. In addition, it provides DiscoveryLink, a customized front end to IBM’s successful
DB/2 relational database product. Among other features, DiscoveryLink allows single-application views
and queries into multiple back-end databases, providing a convenient answer to a very common situa-
tion in bioinformatics, which often deals with many databases simultaneously.
Of higher profile are IBM’s research activities in computational biology. One of these is Blue Gene,
the architectural successor to Deep Blue, the IBM-designed supercomputer that beat chess champion
Gary Kasparov in 1997. Blue Gene, announced in 1999 as a $100 million, 5-year project, is projected to be
1 petaflop (10^15 floating point operations per second), a thousand times more powerful than Deep Blue,
and 30 times more powerful than the NEC Earth-Simulator/5120. Blue Gene is designed in part to be
able to simulate the molecular forces that occur during protein folding, in order to better understand
how a large protein shape emerges from a peptide sequence.^28
Blue Gene is only one project, albeit the best known, of IBM Research’s Computational Biology
Center. This is a group of approximately 35 researchers who are investigating computational techniques
in molecular dynamics, pattern discovery, genome annotation, heterogeneous database techniques, and
so forth.
Hewlett-Packard also maintains a life sciences division, and aggressively sells hardware, software,
and services to genomics research organizations, pharmaceutical companies, and agribusiness.^29 HP
has had good success in winning high-profile clients.
10.2.4.2 Major Life Science Corporations
Genomic bioinformatics, and more generally the use of information technology to support research
and development, has become one of the central pillars of the modern biotechnology industry, espe-
cially the pharmaceutical sector. A wave—some say a boom—of investment in bioinformatics in the late
1990s and early 2000s has tapered off, however, due to disappointing returns amid mounting costs.
While few in the industry doubt the eventual impact of computational techniques, the more significant
effects may not be felt for years. Even in 2002, however, corporate spending in bioinformatics was
estimated to be $1 billion.^30
The first wave of biotechnology firms, established in the 1970s, has grown into multibillion dollar
operations. These firms—Amgen, Biogen, Chiron, Genentech, and Genzyme—were all founded with
(^28) F. Allen, G. Almasi, W. Andreoni, D. Beece, B.J. Berne, A. Bright, J. Bruheroto, et al., “Blue Gene: A Vision for Protein Science
Using a Petaflop Supercomputer,” IBM Systems Journal 40(2):310-327, 2001, available at http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/
sj/402/allen.html.
(^29) See http://www.hp.com/techservers/life_sciences/overview.html.
(^30) See http://www.redherring.com/investor/2002/0419/dealflop.html.