HIE Wire   back to index

Pharmaceutical, biotechnology and genomic companies are at the cutting edge of XML implementation

From Silico Research

London 17 January 2001 

Research by Silico Research concludes that the deployment of XML technology is widespread in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and genomic sectors.  Of the executives surveyed, 75% said that they are currently deploying XML as part of their R&D infrastructure or product range.  Virtually all those who are not deploying XML today expect to be doing so by 2003.

"XML has a number of clear advantages over alternative methods of integrating data and applications.  Those advantages include lower costs, lower skills and knowledge hurdles, greater data presentation abilities, more real-time capabilities, and better back-end integration.  The biopharmaceutical and genomic sectors have realised this and are moving rapidly to adopt the technology,” said Emmett Power, Chief Executive Officer of Silico Research and lead analyst on the research.

The user community (pharmaceutical, biotechnology and genomic companies) has been an enthusiastic adopter of XML with nearly 88% of responding companies saying that they had adopted XML in some measure or other.  The figure for vendors was lower at 63%.  According to the research, this variance is accounted for by the fact that the cost of entry for a user is far lower (ultimately, one scientist sitting in a corner of the laboratory) than for a vendor.  For vendors the adoption of XML may mean a significant investment, the loss of legacy technology and the re-engineering of its products.

The research concludes that the highest deployment of XML is in the early discovery stages of the drug development process.  According to Emmett Power: "Discovery and development process have high data integration and manipulation needs.  Compared to other parts of the research pipeline, early stage research processes such as discovery and development have a overwhelming need to integrate complex data sets."

He continued: "Early stage pharmaceutical teams also typically have deeper IT skills compared to later stage teams, making it easier for early stage teams to experiment with new technologies.  These two factors mean that we are seeing drug discovery teams and scientists becoming early adopters of XML technology."

Other findings of the research include the fact that, despite the fact that there over 50 Document Type Declarations available to users, only three show any significant usage: Bioinformatic Sequence Mark-up Language (BIOML), BIOpolymer Markup Language (BSML) and Genome Annotation Markup Elements (GAME).  Both BIOML and BSML have associated browsers.

"We have found that most user and vendors are adopting a strategy based upon building their own custom DTDs.  This allows a company to map the DTD to its own processes, workflows and internal taxonomies.  Once those DTDs have been built, users are turning their efforts on mapping those DTDs to external DTDs from vendors and industry groups." said Emmett Power.  "We believe that this strategy is well-founded."

For further information contact: Emmett Power, Chief Executive Officer, Silico Research Limited, Telephone: +44 20 7687 2815, Email: Emmett@Silico-Research.com

More:

An Executive Summary of the Research Report and additional information about Silico Research can be found at http://www.Silico-Research.com