What do people hope to gain from microarray experiments in 2008? What relevance does transcriptional profiling on a genome/transcriptome wide scale have when thousands of these experiments have already been done and made publicly available through GEO and MGED? And what about the more recent realizations that short, non-coding RNAs (that were thrown away during sample preparation) are orchestrating another level of regulation – you can’t go back to the original samples to measure the microRNAs? What techniques could make microarray data more usable and meaningful? The GEO interface is god-awful for the occasional user, but look at what Atul Butte can do with these data. Is there still a meaningful discovery aspect of transcriptional profiling studies? How many of the people doing microarrays have the infrastructure to do the kind of followup studies that really demonstrate relevance of their discoveries? I’d wager not many.

Now, a few thoughts on collaboration:

Collaboration is certainly the key to moving knowledge forward in an increasingly interdisciplinary world, but the paradigm we have been brought up in (at least on the science side) is that to be successful academically you have to the one with the idea, the persistence and the ability to tell a story. It doesn’t help to be the third guy from the left when you’re getting credit. Unless everyone feels that their interests are protected, no one (except the young and foolish) will move forward with a collaboration.

So is there a unique role for a small company in this process? I think there are several. But that’s a topic for a future post.