Don't fall behind in bio-IT, observers warn

A Sydney briefing last week on the global bioinformatics market was told that Australia must boost its record on science spending or risk falling behind the so-called 'Asian tiger' economies of its neighbours.

Phil Fersht, the Asia-Pacific regional director of life sciences and consulting for global IT analyst firm IDC, which hosted the event, said IDC estimated that the compound annual growth rate of spending on bio-IT would be 46 per cent in 2002-06.

In Australia, that rate would be 36 per cent, to reach $600 million by 2006, he said.

But Fersht said Australia was too focused on interstate rivalries to look at what was happening globally.

"The 'Asian tiger' economies are injecting billions to start biotech industries from scratch," he said. "What is on Australia's side is that other Asia-Pacific countries will come to it. But it's also important for Australia to come to the global marketplace."

Fersht said Australia was carving out niches in key areas like proteomics and computational biology.

"Too many small biotechs are struggling to survive at the moment, but they are developing a mindset to be commercial and develop a product that will sell," he said, but the Federal government needed to help the process with incentives like tax breaks.

He said people were warming to the idea that biotechnology needed IT to become successful, but pointed to Melbourne-based company Biota as a successful, well-established biotech that was already spreading its IT resources "quite thinly".

He said that at the supercomputing facility at the Australian National University in Canberra, bioscience research processor cycles had increased from 24 per cent of the total last year to 46 per cent in 2002.

"Other areas obviously require computation, but none is as thirsty as biological computation," he said.

"It's a very complex industry. The web of interdependencies is growing and it will continue to grow, over time. The majority of biotech is not going to develop without a solid IT background."

Lionel Binns, the UK-based worldwide life and material sciences group manager for IT giant Hewlett-Packard, told the briefing that while a project such as Tasmania's Intelligent Island was a potential world-beaters, it needed much more funding than its initial $20 million to make the big time.

"I love Australia -- it's a unique place and also one of the most frustrating," Binns said.

"There are five or six State governments and a Federal government and none of them can agree. There is no focus on technology in this country."

Binns said that meanwhile, other countries in the region, such as Taiwan, were committing massive resources to developing biotechnology industries from scratch.

"Australia's population is the same as Taiwan's, but they're doing it from the top," Binns said. "I was speaking with someone from the Taiwanese government who told me that they needed to replace their semiconductor industry, and they're doing it with biotechnology."

Quoting University of Tokyo academic Akiyoshi Wada, from 1986, Binns said that automation in molecular biology could well turn out to be the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution in the life sciences.

But while simulating a nuclear explosion in silico was very simple -- "a linear equation [which] just needs a big computer and some fancy maths" -- there were added challenges for the life sciences. "We have to solve some pretty basic stuff before we can simulate a whole organism."

And a flat biotech market didn't help, he said. "A lot of the companies at the bleeding edge are retrenching staff. Large pharmas are taking money out of R&D and putting it into sales and marketing. There are a numbers of factors that are slowing things down."

Later, Binns told Australian Biotechnology News that population genetics and genomics studies along the lines of the Intelligent Island model, making use of the genomes of Tasmania's 100,000 population, could be an ideal way for Australia to get on the biotech map.

"You need 100,000 people who are ethnically diverse enough [for such a project] to make sense," he said. There were some benefits to Iceland's decode project, but "the problem with Iceland is that Icelanders are all alike".

Intelligent Island was "a smart move", but "$20 million is just not enough" to make it work, he said.

Binns said that competition within Australia for big funding would allow global competition to leapfrog Australia, and continue to contribute to the 'brain-drain': "There are 10,000 expatriate Australian scientists in the US, and most of them are not going to come back."

He said he knew that many people within the Australian biotech community were lobbying to increase awareness of such issues, but that it could require the intervention of someone with major international standing, such as Human Genome Project pioneer Craig Venter, to make the government take notice.

He said that there was scope to establish a pan-Asian version of the European Molecular Biological Laboratory, to which "the scientists come from everywhere" to create a regional centre of excellence.

"Then everybody benefits," he said.