Getting to know Bioinformatics, which has an increasingly important role in Indonesia’s digital future

Bioinformatics has a bright market to develop. It is not surprising that the worldwide demand for bioinformatics experts is on the rise.

Between 2020 and 2027 the global bioinformatics market will increase by 13.4% annually as biological and clinical business institutions seek to provide more effective and efficient data-driven services.

Bioinformatics is a data science application for the biology field. Data science itself has become prevalent to learn, especially in the context of big data.

Social media analytics, finance informatics, and weather forecasting are common areas for data science applications.

The difference is bioinformatics moves in the sector of biology and bioscience. So data science is applied to help solve health, environmental, and food problems.

For example by accessing and optimizing genome and proteome databases for drug and vaccine design.

Arli Aditya Parikesit, Vice-Rector of Research and Innovation at the Indonesia International Institute for Life Sciences (i3L) Monday (July 26, 2021) said it was very important for Indonesian students to study Bioinformatics today.

“Data is the new oil. If data, especially biological data, can be processed properly, it will produce useful and valuable information.

For example, the phenomenal COVID-19 mRNA vaccine made by Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna, was initially designed using molecular simulations based on bioinformatics devices,” said Arli.

Similarly with the initial design of antiretroviral drugs for HIV/AIDS, where scientists have used bioinformatics science since the 90s for this purpose.

All major pharmaceutical industries have a bioinformatics division, although with the varies naming according to the needs of the company.

Studying bioinformatics is also important for solving environmental problems, such as waste treatment solutions, as well as food solutions such as the development of new supplements

Arli said that the development of bioinformatics in the future is very rapid.

He explained that the rapid development of Covid-19 vaccines and drugs was partly due to the role of bioinformatics.

“Even the discovery of new SARS-CoV-2 variants such as the alpha and especially delta variants, which are currently ‘attacking’ our country, has been helped a lot by analysis of Whole genome sequencing data with bioinformatics tools,” he said.

Scientists are currently conducting extensive research, the possibility that in the future another type of coronavirus will cause a pandemic, and research to find universal drugs and vaccines that can overcome all types of coronaviruses.

In the future, the application of molecular medicine will be smarter with the help of bioinformatics.

Technological progress is inseparable from the influence of bioinformatics itself.

Arli explained, bioinformatics can operate within the framework of a contactless economy, in the context of this science it can still be studied and executed by conducting research anywhere and anytime as long as you have a computer, internet access, and if possible, cloud storage.

Therefore, predictions of the occurrence of a pandemic, as well as genomic surveillance (genomic surveillance) will be done more quickly, precisely, and accurately.

So there is no need to wait a long time for the identification of variants and types of the new coronavirus.

“Cloud storage technology is also supported by the existence of a supercomputer, which can perform molecular simulations for all organelles and biomolecules in cells,” explained Arli.