Biobanks offer a rich source of data for biomed startups, but the route to deriving maximum benefit from them is not always straightforward. We talk to Matt Brauer, Vice President of Data Science at Maze Therapeutics, about his experience with the UK Biobank, Finngen and other consortia, and the role that making data-management processes open-source has had in delivering business success.

The course of academic research rarely runs smoothly, and through her 30-year career in genetics, Professor Lygia V. Pereira has certainly seen plenty of challenges – but also lots of successes. We talk to her about the importance of genetic diversity to better serve the health needs of countries like Brazil but also to improve our understanding of disease and health across all populations, and why we need to make bioinformatics tools truly user-friendly.

In the latest interview in our cutting-edge series, Ahmed Abdeen Hamed, Assistant Professor of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at Norwich University, explains the power of network sciences to solve intractable data analysis problems and why this approach is proving valuable in the medical sciences.

We’re talking to Professor John Quackenbush from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who throughout his 30-year career has addressed big questions in human health by combining his twin passions of genomics and data analysis.

We spoke to Dr. David De Graaf, CEO of biotech company, Abcuro, on the issue of data flow for pharma companies, as well as the different ways that he can see computational tools making a big difference in drug discovery.

Here Dr. Martin Hemberg, Assistant Professor of Neurology, Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Member of the Faculty, Harvard Medical School, envisions a future in which bioinformatics challenges are continually being solved to deal with the ever-increasing volume of data that is being produced.