Translating Research

or why Academia does not create MVPs…

From a bioinformatics algorithm to a minimum viable product. It seems like a trivial process and should indeed be a no-brainer, however, creating real products from research work is almost an impossible task.

I’ve been doing computer science research applied to bioinformatics for over 5 years. I worked on a couple large-scale international projects and developed a few web applications. However, unless you are working for a large (EBI, EMBL, NCBI/NIH, SwissProt…) research institute, is very very hard to go beyond the “good enough” level and drive more user adoption.

And why?

The translational research prerogative is flawed. Creating real marketable products from scientific work implies an effort level that is beyond reach of most research groups.

Let’s look at a simple scenario. You spend 1 year researching a new algorithm that improves the...