Bioinformatics engineer
What is bioinformatics?
In a not so far away future, your doctor might not prescribe you ibuprofen or aspirin for your headache - just because it helps a lot of people. Instead, he will give you the medicine that is suitable specifically for you, taking into consideration your lifestyle, environment, and your own genomic footprint.
In order to achieve such a future, we need to analyze lots of our own data. That is one of the areas where bioinformatics jumps in - it combines biology, data analysis, programming, and statistics with the goal to derive useful information from our genomic data and help us understand the development and treatments of new diseases or to get more familiar with specific mutations which affect our organism.
What does a bioinformatics engineer do?
Having in mind that bioinformatics is a broad topic, a day in the life of several bioinformatics engineers can look quite different.
Most of today’s bioinformaticians’ jobs are connected with the analysis of next-generation sequencing data.
Let me show you an example.
In order to obtain a list of genes that are activated in a (tumor) sample, bioinformatician needs to do several analyses starting from getting results from a sequencer, in a certain digitalized format, to checking the quality of the data, running several analyses depending on the research topic and finally creating the final results.
The main task of a bioinformatics engineer is to develop those analyses by using computer algorithms to solve biological problems, which require knowledge from a wide range of topics.
Bioinformaticians work a lot with Academia, researchers, and Universities, and on the other hand, pharmaceutical companies and other clients. A person working in this field also needs to follow new trends in the different research areas and have a plan for how that can be useful for commercial purposes.
Most bioinformaticians work in teams. Genomics analyses are being run on various biological data (DNA, RNA, etc), so having a diverse team with different expertise is a big plus.
Job outlook
Although bioinformatics is not a new topic - the very beginnings of bioinformatics occurred more than 50 years ago, when desktop computers were still a hypothesis and DNA could not yet be sequenced, the jobs for bioinformatics engineers skyrocketed after the completion of the Human Genome Project (April 14th, 2003) and the demand for them kept growing. The Human Genome Project was an international scientific research project with the goal of determining the base pairs that make up human DNA and identifying and mapping all of the genes of the human genome.
If you type in on Linkedin ‘bioinformatics’ there are currently 8340 job posts. Glassdoor found 15553, while indeed found 4053. Taking the data from BCC research, the global bioinformatics market should grow from $7.5 billion in 2018 to $20.0 billion by 2023.
Having in mind the fuzz about Big Data, there is no doubt that the need for these kinds of specialists is rising. Scientists who can analyze large amounts of information and present it in a clear manner to decision-makers are finding the sky is the limit in terms of jobs and career pathways, especially in the big pharma and biotech sectors.
In Serbia, Seven Bridges is one of only a few, and definitely the largest bioinformatics company. It is a multinational company that operates on several different continents. Currently, the bioinformatics team counts around 40 professionals.
How much does a bioinformatics engineer earns?
A bioinformatics engineer’s salary varies, depending on several factors: what type of work (s)he does, for which company, and how much.
Asking Google, the average pay for a Bioinformatics Engineer is $101,179 a year and $49 an hour in the United States. The average salary range for a Bioinformatics Engineer is between $71,125 and $125,576.
In Europe, they can earn anything between EUR 24,000 per year at the start of their career to a gross annual salary of about EUR 70,000.
In general, a bioinformatician's salary depends on the nature of their degree and their prior professional experience.
Types of bioinformatics engineers
As mentioned previously, bioinformatics demands knowledge and expertise from a wide range of topics. That is why, for example, both biologist and a programmer can work in this field. People interested in the more technical aspect of the topic work on creating the infrastructure and automating the analyses which need to be performed on large sets of data. They can also be involved in creating novel computational algorithms for processing biological data. On the other hand, bioinformaticians who are more science-oriented, work on researching novel scientific papers and create and combine a set of tools for processing the data. A bioinformatician can choose to specialize and expand expertise in only one type of analysis (for example RNA analysis) and build models which contribute to that area. In general, bioinformatics engineers work closely with both software engineers’ teams and medical teams.
Top skills needed
The question that arises for the field of bioinformatics is: is it a jack of all trades, and master of none?
I would say that bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field. Having that in mind, it requires expertise from more than one field and some knowledge of all others.
From the technical side, few skills stand out: programming skills (Python and R are the most used programming languages, however, that depends on the type of work you do and the company), data analytics, databases, cloud, statistics, mathematics, biology. The more you know, the better :)
Soft skills are, as in most fields, quite important. Bioinformaticians collaborate with different teams and clients and need to present their ideas in an understandable manner, therefore, good communication skills are a must. It is beneficial if you have good research skills and an analytical mind since a lot of your work will require it.
However, the most important thing is to have a curious mind and a ready-to-learn attitude.
