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Stanford business student
Greg Yap
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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. |
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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.
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Diary of a Job
Hunter |
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A Stanford B-school
student on his 21st-century job search |
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Day 1:
The Current
State of Affairs |
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Day 2:
What
Matters Most |
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Day 3:
Where the
Grads Are |
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Day 4:
Decisions,
Decisions |
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Day 5:
Biotech
Bound |
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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, Inc.
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Looking Beyond The Dot Bomb (Newsweek Magazine, 28 April 2001)
