Microsoft focuses on Life Sciences - Again?

Whenever a big player flexes its muscles, it helps to pay attention. Such is the case with a recent announcement by Microsoft to make a difference in the Life Sciences space.

In brief, Microsoft has created the BioIT Alliance, "a cross-industry group working to further integrate science and technology as a first step toward making personalized medicine a reality. The alliance unites the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, hardware and software industries to explore new ways to share complex biomedical data and collaborate among multidisciplinary teams to ultimately speed the pace of drug discovery and development."

At first blush, and based on the initial set of participants (see below), the alliance seems to be focused on the discovery space. However, in a recent article in Drug Discovery News, Don Rule, Platform Strategy Advisor for Microsoft, stated that "Over time, it became clear that the effort was not as compelling unless we started to put together an end-to-end story,” he says. “We needed to be able to go from the bench to the bedside. Our strongest role in the alliance may be helping to do that by taking complex technology and putting it in end users’ hands in a more manageable fashion."

If you've been following the discovery space over the past 5 years, it is obvious that Microsoft is simply playing catch-up here with IBM. Hopefully they are serious about this and will not disappoint the alliance members. We shall see. It is, at least, encouraging that Bill Gates weighed in on this initiative. He has stated that "Advances in our understanding of the human genome promise to revolutionize medicine and open the door to therapies that are tailored to individuals. By bringing together people from innovative life sciences organizations that span the biomedical industry, the BioIT Alliance will play an important role in the development of solutions that transform today’s data into knowledge and improve the quality of millions of lives."

My personal concern is that the alliance will be swayed to use Microsoft products and thus become "closed minded" when it comes to finding the best solution to a given problem. This certainly seems to be the case with one of the initiatives already under way, "the Collaborative Molecular Environment, which will provide a means for data capture, visualization, annotation and archiving using Microsoft Office, Windows Presentation Foundation and SharePoint Technologies."

Mind you, I'm not suggesting that the problems of data capture, visualization, annotation and archiving can't be solved by Microsoft products. I do wonder, though, whether they are the best, most elegant or cost effective way to do so. And, exactly what chance will other software or service providers have to break into this club. Will any views that don't align with the Microsoft approach be heard?

The founding members include Affymetrix, Accelrys, Amylin, Applied Biosystems, The BioTeam, Digipede Technologies, Discovery Biosciences Corp., Geospiza Inc., HP, InterKnowlogy, Sun Microsystems and VizX Labs.

Caveat Emptor. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

P.S. - According to Cheryl North, director of the company's pharmaceutical and life-sciences business strategy, Microsoft has more than 500 employees in life sciences and health care. One goal in the next three years is to "build an infrastructure of people inside Microsoft who ... have deep knowledge of the biopharma industry," she said.