AS I
SAID BEFORE, it’s important to me that I join a company whose products will
ultimately change the world. Yes, the word genomics has been all over the media
lately, but we are only beginning to get beyond the buzzword to understand what
it really means.
So what’s coming up in biotechnology? It’s a pretty
complicated field, no doubt, but I’ll try to give you a glimpse into a few areas
I am particularly excited about:
Knowledge management: Today, scientists
today churn out more data in one experiment than they did in a lifetime only a
few years ago. So much data, in fact, that our ability to create it far
outweighs our ability to organize, manage and retrieve it. The need for better
ways to access and juggle all of this information that comes along with drug
development is tremendous. The challenge lies in trying to satisfy all of the
different scientists who want their information in various formats. Still, if we
ever have a successful infrastructure for information and knowledge management,
I think the payoff will be huge, both for the people who create it and for those
who use it.
New Technologies: Drug researchers are
always looking for new tools that will help them answer new questions, or answer
today’s questions faster and more cheaply. Microfluidics companies hope to build
small inexpensive “chips” that integrate many complicated experiments into one
simple device. Uses range from reducing the cost of drug research to developing
new medical diagnostics. Proteomics companies are working to find better ways to
analyze proteins. Proteins are like balls of yarn, twisted up in ways that make
them very difficult to analyze. But they do much of the work in the human body,
and being able to understand them would enable the medical community to discover
even better drugs.
Personalized medicine: Today, doctors are forced to make life-and-death treatment decisions with
little information. But some day they will routinely analyze an individual’s
genome in order to prescribe the safest and most effective combination of drugs
and therapies. When this happens, two different people with the same disease
might be treated uniquely, depending upon how their genes affect their
condition. Companies could develop drugs that seem similar but in reality are
tailored to very specific genetic diagnoses. Inaccurate medicines could be
replaced with an arsenal of specialized disease-fighters. <!--
No one knows how
long it will take before personalized medicine has any real impact on health
care—some companies are jumping in now; other say it will take 20 years before
anything happens. Either way, a huge amount of work still must be done. We need
to identify what variations in genes mean, so we can better diagnose diseases
and recommend treatments. Many as-of-yet unproven links between specific genes
and health conditions need to be established. Companies will need to license
each other’s discoveries so that the best and most comprehensive tests can be
developed. Drug companies that now sell drugs as “one size fits all” will have
to change their approaches when treatments become more tailored to
individuals.
I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to share a week of my job search
with you. It’s been a twisting path of observations, personal accounts, and
reflections, but I hope you’ve found it interesting. As for me, I’m hoping to
complete my job search in the next month. No matter what, I think these next few
years will be amazing.
Greg Yap is a
native of Silicon Valley who was briefly but happily exiled to the east coast at
Princeton University, where he graduated with an A.B. in molecular biology.
Since then, he has held positions in business development at Affymetrix, a
Silicon Valley genomics company; in venture capital at Bay City Capital, a San
Francisco health care merchant bank; and in management consulting at McKinsey
& Co. He will receive his M.B.A. degree at the Stanford Graduate School of
Business in June.
© 2001
Newsweek