The global bioinformatics market, valued at nearly $3.2 billion in 2012, is forecast to grow to nearly $7.5 billion by 2017, according to Wellesley, Mass.-based BCC Research.

The market attracts considerable funding from central governments and is driven by applications across a variety of sectors, including biotechnology, pharmaceutical research and development, agriculture, food safety, chemicals, manufacturing, and more recently, clinical genomics, according to the research.

Growth in the market has been driven by the industries' need to adopt more cost-effective and productive methods for commercializing proprietary information, researchers found. Companies are looking for suppliers that can offer total integration of data infrastructure, which includes data sharing, data security, customization, data searching and analysis.

[See also: HIT unprepared for 'omics' onslaught.]

The United States holds the largest segment of the bioinformatics market, accounting for 52.8 percent of global sales, followed by Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. The majority of revenues are generated from analysis software and analytical services, which account for nearly 47.6 percent of revenues, although data-analysis software and analytical services comprise the strongest growing segment with a 2012-2017 compound annual growth rate of 20.3 percent.

The research also found the following:

• Bioinformatics tools and services have important roles to play in all aspects of drug discovery and development as they help to design drugs, predict drug metabolism and toxicity, and model drug-gene or drug-protein interactions.
• In the post-genomic era, gathering biological information is no longer a bottleneck for scientific researchers. The major hurdle remains in the efficient organization, analysis, and interpretation of the data. The establishment, maintenance and open access of large datasets has been important in driving this field forward, as they have allowed researchers throughout the world to find new ways to analyze and interpret information into new knowledge.
• Raw data is meaningless without context. The ultimate goal of bioinformatics is to extract knowledge from large-scale data. There are currently hundreds of software tools available online, many of which were developed by leading academic institutions and are freely available, enabling researchers to undertake sequencing, alignment, structure, and function analysis for a range of biological data.
• More data is being collected than can be physically stored; the storage gap is widening, and selecting which data to archive has become a major issue. During the last 30 years, IT infrastructure has become more integrated, and it has rapidly evolved from a computer cluster model to a cloud computing platform that allows computational capacity to be purchased as a service from a cloud computing provider.

[See also: Weill Cornell Medical College creates center for informatics, policy.]