A.P. Gill, an IT professional working on clinical research-database analysis, wants to know about hot areas in scientific information consulting.
Frank Mara, vice president of marketing for Ingenuity Systems, Mountain View, Calif., says companies are looking for consultation on experimental platforms, such as mass spectrometry and microarrays. People with knowledge about proteomics and high-throughput siRNA screening are in demand as well, says Mara, whose company provides databases and analysis software for protein signal transduction pathways. Clinical areas in demand include patient population segmentation, molecular pathways associated with toxicological effects, and identification and validation of drug target pathways. Technologies in demand include microarray, gene expression, proteomics, and siRNA screening.
Clinical or medical informatics has expanded. Consumer Informatics experts, for example, are "essentially taking the power of the Internet, electronic health records, and information databases and putting them into the hands of lay people" to make sure they have full access to...