Reflections on Ten Years of Bio-IT

March 12, 2012 | To mark the 10^th anniversary of Bio-IT World’s launch in March 2002, we have invited dozens of prominent scientists and bio-IT professionals, many of whom have featured in our pages and our conferences over the years, to reflect on the most transformative changes they have witnessed over the past decade.  

We asked for reflection on advances and changes in the industry, suggestions for where technology and bio-IT are going, and key challenges facing the various bio-IT fields. Our contributors offered their hopes and predictions for the years ahead spanning ‘Big Data,’ personalized medicine, ‘omics technology, informatics, drug discovery, clinical trials, and systems biology.  

We’ll post contributions regularly between now and the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston in April. As contributions are posted, you’ll find them all at http://www.bio-itworld.com/10th-anniversary/ We thank everyone who participated and hope you enjoy these fascinating insights into our rapidly evolving industry.  

The Editors  

Transformative Sequencing | Jonathan Rothberg, founder, Ion Torrent Systems | This is the moment. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) is poised to transform medicine. In the last decade, my introduction of high-throughput NGS enabled new fields such as meta-genomics, deciphered the elusive bumblebee contagion and unraveled the genomes of countless species including Neandertal man. Now, with the latest sequencing technology in hand, we have the ability to capture complete genetic information on complex chronic diseases such as, cardiovascular disease, autism, and cancer.