Data as a Moat: Why Biotech's Most Valuable Asset is Buried in a Hard Drive

About this episode

The episode discusses the challenges and strategies for improving data infrastructure in biotech organizations.

In this episode of Data in Biotech, host Ross Katz sits down with Jesse Johnson, founder of Merelogic, a software consulting firm specializing in data infrastructure for biotech organizations. Jesse brings a rare perspective to the conversation: having built data systems at Google where engineers control the data collection function end to end, before moving into biotech, where the biology does what it wants and bench scientists, not engineers, generate the data. The result is a grounded, pragmatic take on one of the most consequential and underappreciated questions in life sciences right now: as bio foundation models fundamentally change the value equation for experimental data, are biotech labs structured to capture that value? Jesse argues the answer is usually no and that the fix is less technical than most assume. It doesn't require a production-grade data pipeline or a cloud architecture. It requires lightweight, human-readable standard operating procedures, clear expectations between computational and wet lab teams, and a data strategy designed not just for the questions you're asking today, but for the ones you don't yet know you'll need to ask. What you’ll learn in this…

People in this episode

Host: Ross Katz

Guest: Jesse Johnson

Topics covered

• data infrastructure
• biotech
• bio foundation models
• experimental data
• organizational change

Keywords

• data strategy
• biotech labs
• standard operating procedures
• data collection
• experimental data value

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Merelogic, Google

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