Good News for the Market

The great news for the market is that Bioinformatics is going to continue to grow with a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) approximately 20.4% by year 2020. Bad news is that bioinformatics market is hindered by a "lack of inoperability among data formats" and a lack of talented, skilled professionals.

So lets first address the "lack of inoperability among data formats". In other words ... as a profession we lack standardization. We write code to fit the test data we are using and the test data might not be in the same format as your data. So this leaves you having to either reformat the data or re-write the code. And this cycle repeats itself. If you have been following along with my posts already, you know that lack of standards drives me (and others) nuts! This is especially infuriating for researchers who are mostly interested in applied bioinformatics and half of the reason why almost every science lab needs a bioinformatician (the other half of the reason is that "gone are the days of Excel"). Two things are going to drive this change. First, clinical research and big pharm cannot afford to allow this nonsense to go on. This is why there is a big boom for commercial bioinformatics software designed to run and re-run the same analyses over and over again (a production pipeline vs. a R&D pipeline). I believe that those of us writing bioinformatics code hoping to one day be commercial will start writing in a standard that will be more appealing to buyers and thus creating a standard. Second, I really think there will eventually be a little group of bioinformatics professionals who will release guidelines to hold the profession accountable for. The only reason I can think as to why this hasn't happened is that the market is growing too rapidly for anyone to take a moment to approach this.

Now to address the lack of skilled and trained professionals. For all purposes, bioinformatics is a data science field and it competes for data scientists with other industries. As I mentioned in a previous post, there are colleagues of mine that I have personally known to have been trained in bioinformatics who find employment in other fields. As depressing as it is, when you Google "bioinformatics as a profession" you will stumble on at least one rant from someone leaving the profession for another career. It is true that the market is growing, but so is the market for data scientists in general. Bioinformatics programs combine data science training with training in biology (you have to know something about the biology). Glassdoor estimates that the national average salary for a bioinformatics scientist is $85,149. The national average salary for a data scientist is $118,709. Keep in mind: bioinformatics is still tied strongly to academia (where salaries in general are much lower) and there are certain biotech hubs where salaries for bioinformaticians are much more comparable to a data scientist. Every business is looking for a data scientist and the field of data science has also had to define itself and is still defining itself (here is a really fun discussion on YouTube by the Royal Statistical Society). Not only are salaries better, but these jobs are not always restricted to a few hubs. Plus there is less of an emphasis on degree and publication record for other data science positions outside of bioinformatics.

So how can we make bioinformatics more attractive?

1. Pay better. Although this is much harder to achieve given bioinformatics is still deeply rooted in academia and sadly biologist already lose out in earnings of PhDs (the group of people most often in need of applied bioinformatics).

2. Replace people with tools. R-bloggers approached this back in 2012 with data science and I would agree with this opinion. Bioinformatics isn't just technical, but sociological. There will always be a need for people who understand the principles and methods of bioinformatics to adequately communicate about the data, its findings and to advocate for future approaches.

It will be interesting to see how the market will look in the next 5 years and some real data on graduates after earning degrees in bioinformatics. I would like to think that as companies place emphasis on data scientists ability to save millions of dollars, the bioinformatics industry will place emphasis on bioinformaticians ability to improve quality of life. Or, more likely, health insurance companies placing emphasis on bioinformaticians saving them money with pre-diagnostics...