IBM's life science focus

On a recent visit to Sydney, IBM Life Sciences chief Caroline Kovac outlined her views on bio-IT, the life sciences and Australia's potential.

The week before her visit to Australia, Kovac was inducted into the Hall of Fame of Women in Technology, joining notables like astronaut Bonnie Dunbar, former Nortel vice-president Claudine Simson, and Nobel laureate Gertrude Elion, of Glaxo.

"People look at scientists and have a stereotype of geekoids isolated in the lab with bad hair," Kovac told the San Francisco Chronicle. "It's a shame that cultural factors discourage 50 per cent of the population from careers in technology."

Fortunately for technology, Kovac herself has not been beset by any such image problem. In Australia last week on a whistle-stop tour, she outlined her views on the future of the life sciences, and where companies like IBM fit in.

Eddie Clunies-Ross, IBM Australia's healthcare industry manager, says Kovac is a big drawcard when she visits. And since she took the reins at IBM Life Sciences two years ago, she has propelled Big Blue into some radically new areas.

"Our goal with IBM is not to be a life science company, but right now biology and computing are inexorably connected," she says. "Biology has changed so much in the last five years that you can't do it without computing."

Kovac quotes a report by analyst IDC, which recently revised its projection of growth in the high-performance computing market from 8 per cent to 12 per cent, based on the 30 per cent growth in the bio-IT sector.

IBM missed out on the human genome project gravy train that its competitor Oracle enjoyed, but is determined not to miss the life sciences' next wave. Kovac says the company is looking at opportunities in four broad areas. As well as the obvious areas of high-performance computing, bioinformatics and software infrastructures, IBM is also positioning itself as a key player in the complex fields of information-based medicine and clinical trial automation.

Kovac explains that the issue being touted as "the Y2K of the pharmaceutical industry" is the US Food and Drug Administration's target of 80 per cent of its clinical trial data to be submitted electronically.

"The length of time to get a drug to market is about 15 years," she says. "The only amount of time that has shrunk [in the drug discovery to market timeline] is the approval process. I think the FDA has been very responsive in that sense. The fact is they have a hard job to do."

Kovac is excited about the cutting-edge field of information-based medicine.

"Today, medicine is practiced in a statistical manner," she says. "A doctor will prescribe a drug on the basis of clinical trials. But we know that the best drugs are only effective on 60-70 per cent of patients."

While there are few genomic-based drugs before the FDA, Kovac says, the promise of drugs like Gleevec and Herceptin is that they can better target diseases based on a person's own genetic characteristics.

Asked whether the big cost of designer drugs outweighs their benefits, Kovac counters that the cost of mis-prescription is currently a huge drain on the healthcare system. "I think that targeted medicine is good for the healthcare system and good for the public," she says. "It's going to happen, regardless of the pharmaceutical industry."

The result, she says, could be an end to big pharma's current 'blockbuster' mentality.

IBM's involvement in the field includes a partnership with giant US-based researcher The Mayo Clinic, which has six million consented patient records. "They want to research correlating gene expression data and SNP data. It's a really good example of how you have to have both the biotech piece - the ability to genotype many patients - and the IT piece," Kovac says.

"This is the next stem in what is already as fast-growing area. Next is applying this scientific knowledge to patient care."

In another project, IBM is working with the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University, which is researching gene expression in five kinds of cancer.

Despite big advances in technology, Kovac says there is still no substitute for clinical trials - "to actually be able to model the biology is a long way away." But in that area "companies like [IBM partner] Physiome Sciences are building very interesting models," she says, and predicting changes at the molecular level.

During Kovac's visit, IBM highlighted its latest Australian biotech deal - supplying the hardware needed by Melbourne company Cytopia to run its Chemaphore drug discovery platform.

Cytopia is a small company, like most companies at biotech's cutting edge. Which raises the question - how does a company the size of Big Blue make itself available to the small companies who most need its technology?

Kovac admits that IBM is often seen as being too big to work with small customers like Cytopia.

"But we think a tremendous amount of innovation is coming from small to medium-sized biotech companies like Cytopia," she says. "It's a very exciting new customer set. Working with customers like Cytopia, we learn about working with a new, emerging market."

Clunies-Ross agrees, and says IBM is well aware that it needs to be engaged "on the ground floor" to make sure that it doesn't miss out on opportunities. "We don't want to be in a position where we knock on their doors in 10 years' time and they don't need us any more," he says.

That means IBM needs to support the Australian biotech community. "The key is understanding that we operate in a global market," says Clunies-Ross. "If IBM is to succeed in the local market, then Australia has to succeed in the global market."

Kovac's visit down under made a positive impression. "My observation is that there is certainly an intent in Australia," she says. "Everywhere I go everyone is talking about leadership strategies and government investment.

"Put your assets to work and you can attract capital from overseas."