Sphinx Bio reposted this
Speed is the most underrated thing in biotech. A common response is "But cells take time to grow" or "biological/clinical time scales are just longer" (or less charitably "what does this software person know about the wet lab anyways"). I'm not denying that there are certain physical limitations that are hard to change. But that doesn't mean you can't move faster in every aspect — even when doing novel science. Let's take an example near and dear to my heart: Sometimes when I talk to scientists, they seem skeptical that saving a few hours on their data processing and analysis is worthwhile. But let's examine what happens if you need to wait on your computational team to process the data. Say you're running a reasonably complex 3 day experiment and you get a readout at 4pm on Wednesday. If you need to wait for someone else to process the data and get back to you, you might not get the results until Thursday morning. Now it's too late to set up the next experiment until next Monday. And maybe that keeps happening until your timelines for in vitro validation have slipped enough that you missed the window to get into in vivo studies and have to wait until next month... A couple of hour ballooning into weeks or months is an extreme example, but this happens on smaller scales every day! Speed *is* important and should be prioritized everywhere, even in early R&D processes. After all, we're all trying to do the same thing: get life saving medicines to patients as quickly as possible.