IBM keeps to the bioIT straight and narrow

IBM said it has no plans to take its bioIT products direct to the consumer, despite the potential for increased sales numbers.

“Our focus is on systems biology and information based medicine,” said Dr Ajay Royyuru, head of the Computational Biology Centre at IBM Research. “But we are sticking with our focus on infrastructure and middleware; the plumbing as it were,” he added.

Royyuru’s team is working across a number of research areas including functional genomics, bioinformatics, protein science, structural biology and systems biology.

Royyuru cited links and collaborations with Queensland’s Institute of Molecular Bioscience (IMB), the Mayo Clinic, Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and other prestigious centres of research as evidence it was serious about its role as a major bioIT player.

“We have active engagement with many major research centres, and are looking particularly at techniques for microarray analysis and discovering pathways in cancer. We are concentrating on new molecular techniques,” he said.

Royyuru said the IMB site was being used as a mirror site for some of the advanced tools being developed at other sites. “This is a great opportunity for us to test our advanced bioinformatics tools. We are also doing the same thing at the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC) in Melbourne,” he noted.

“Our (IBM’s) focus is to focus on the infrastructure and developing the partnership approach. This is the key difference between us and many of our competitors. We rarely stretch into end user solutions, and don’t intend to in the biotech business,” said Royyuru.