Modern research into disease, injury and potential treatments has increasingly become the domain of a new breed of scientist, who’s more likely to spend the day collating massive amounts of data into usable research, as opposed to working with beakers and bunsen burners.
Ryan Brinkman is Vice President and Research Director for Dotmatics, an international leader in the development of software for research and development.
“They need algorithms and software to go through all this data, and figure out what’s the important bits that help us understand human health and disease,” he continued.
He tells KRMG COVID, as in so many other instances, helped accelerate a process that was already well under way.
“A lot of science right now is data science,” he told KRMG.
Dotmatics essentially does for researchers what Adobe does for media creators, or Microsoft Office does for business owners.
It provides a suite of programs that can work together to help gather, collate, and analyze the incalculably huge amount of data being generated by researchers.
Brinkman believes in time, that may lead to breakthroughs for some conditions that haven’t gotten a lot of research funding, largely because they affect a small percentage of the population.
“There are diseases that are just left untreated, because the cost to develop that treatment is just too much. So people are dying, but pharma’s not looking at that because... it’s an orphan drug problem. But with our ability to generate data, and the ability to automate a lot of these processes, the costs have come down, which gives us an ability to look at places we just wouldn’t look before.
“(We can) generate data and have the tools that let us look in the dark to see the solutions that we couldn’t have done before,” Brinkman said.